How Yggdrasil is rethinking the economics of game creation
Online casino is ultimately in the business of entertainment – and keeping players entertained means continuing to give them something that feels new. With consumers facing an abundance of competing ways to spend their time, repetition risks making it harder for any entertainment product to hold their attention.
While thousands of new casino games reach the market every year – with research suggesting the number of releases is growing by around 10% each quarter – volume does not necessarily equate to variety. Developing something genuinely different means taking a risk, while the industry’s familiar practice of reskinning existing games, or adapting mechanics and concepts that have already proved successful, offers a much safer commercial proposition.
For James Curwen, chief executive at Yggdrasil, the tension between the industry’s need for fresh content and the commercial realities of producing it goes to the heart of the challenge.
“The industry has a content problem,” he says. “There are thousands of games being released and too many of them are variations of something that already exists.
“Part of the reason is economics. When games take months and significant money to develop, people naturally become risk-averse. Building on something that already works becomes the safer option.”
The risk-reward equation
For Curwen, tackling the problem therefore means changing the risk-reward equation behind game creation. If creators can develop and test ideas more quickly and at significantly lower cost, an unsuccessful experiment becomes less consequential – and taking a chance on something genuinely different becomes easier to justify.
“Technology changes the equation,” he says. “If we can make development faster and significantly more cost-efficient, creators can afford to experiment again.
“I’ve said before that I think we’re moving towards the end of the traditional reskin model. Players don’t need another 100 versions of effectively the same game.”
“The ambition is to give talented creators the freedom to try more ideas.”
It is with that ambition that Yggdrasil has developed two new solutions that Curwen believes can change both how games are created and who is able to create them. Game in a Box™ is designed to make the development process faster, more efficient and more flexible, while Studio in a Box™ goes a step further, giving businesses the tools to build their own portfolio of original games without the need to establish a traditional studio of their own.
Putting creators back in control
Game in a Box™ addresses the development process itself. Traditionally, a game idea passes through multiple stages – from maths and development to QA and certification – potentially involving different teams and repeated rounds of work.
Game in a Box™ brings those stages into a connected workflow, giving creators greater control over a game as it evolves. The platform is already being used internally by Yggdrasil and is being piloted with selected partners ahead of its wider market release.
Curwen points to Raptor 2 as an example of what this means in practice. The game went through no fewer than 17 versions during its first couple of weeks of development.
“Speed of iteration is probably the biggest difference,” he says. “Traditionally, every significant change can create another development cycle involving several different teams. With Game in a Box™, the creator can iterate much closer to real time.”
Crucially, Curwen sees those efficiencies as a means to an end rather than the primary objective.
“That’s where I think Game in a Box™ becomes really interesting,” Curwen says. “The ambition isn’t to use technology to make average games faster. It’s to give talented creators the freedom to try more ideas and hopefully produce better games.”
Building a studio without building a studio
As work on Game in a Box™ progressed, Yggdrasil began to see an opportunity extending beyond its own production process.
Historically, building a game studio meant putting all the necessary components in place – from developers and mathematicians to QA and compliance, as well as the underlying systems and integrations. Alternatively, a business looking to enter the market could acquire an existing studio.
Both routes require significant investment. However, as Curwen, adds: “There are plenty of people in this industry with great ideas, brands, audiences or distribution who don’t want to build an entire slot studio from scratch.”
Studio in a Box™ is designed to provide another option. Yggdrasil handles the technology, infrastructure and support, leaving its partners to concentrate on the brand, creative ideas and commercial direction of their games.
The result, according to Curwen, is “democratising game creation”.
“The priority is to prove the model properly; make sure the games perform and demonstrate that it works commercially.”
The proposition is already being tested commercially. Live casino supplier Eeze has become the first supplier to utilise Studio in a Box™ as it looks to expand its proprietary content into slots. Using Yggdrasil’s framework also gives Eeze access to its wider distribution network.
The first games are expected towards the end of the year, with the partnership ultimately targeting a release cadence of two games per month. For Curwen, Eeze demonstrates the demand among established gaming businesses for greater ownership of their content strategy without the cost and complexity of creating a conventional development operation.
Opening up game creation
The implications could extend well beyond companies already established in other areas of gaming.
“You shouldn’t necessarily need 100 people and millions of euros of infrastructure to have a great idea and turn it into a successful slot,” Curwen says.
Lower barriers to entry could significantly widen the pool of potential game creators. Curwen sees opportunities not only for established and emerging studios, but for operators, suppliers, entrepreneurs and potentially entirely new entrants.
“The big change is that technology can increasingly provide the infrastructure,” he says. “The creator provides the idea. And I think that will make the industry much more interesting.”
For Yggdrasil, Game in a Box™ and Studio in a Box™ are therefore intended to become more than tools for its own development operation. Curwen envisages them supporting a wider creator ecosystem, although he acknowledges that proving the model commercially must come first.
“We’re still early,” he says. “The priority is to prove the model properly; make sure the games perform and demonstrate that it works commercially. If we do that, I think the opportunity is significant.”
The studio of the future
Five years from now, Curwen expects the development landscape – and the studios operating within it – to look markedly different.
“I don’t think the successful studio of the future necessarily has hundreds of people,” he says. “It could be a relatively small group of extremely talented people with great ideas, strong brands and a very good understanding of players, supported by technology that does much of the heavy lifting.”
That would also shift the basis on which studios compete. If sophisticated development capabilities become accessible to a wider range of creators, scale alone becomes less of an advantage.
“It becomes less about how many developers you employ and much more about how creative you are and how well you understand the player,” Curwen says.
For an industry already producing content at enormous scale, that distinction is important. The promise of Game in a Box™ and Studio in a Box™ is not simply that they can help put even more games into an already crowded market.
Instead, Curwen hopes that by removing some of the cost and risk that have traditionally surrounded development, creators will have greater freedom to take chances on what they produce.
“That’s ultimately where I want Game in a Box™ to take us,” he says. “Technology handles more of the complexity, while people concentrate on creating great games.”