Building a 200-Title Studio With No Industry Experience, With G.Games’ Helen Walton

[00:00]  1. Intro: Welcome to Bet It Drives

Host:  Welcome to Bet It Drives, the show that takes you for a ride through the iGaming world. I’m Eugene, and today I’ll be driving you to the industry insights, hot topics and juicy trends. If we don’t take a wrong turn, we might even get to the business side of things. Let’s hit the road and see where it takes us.

Guest:  All right. Okay, I’m ready.

[00:40]  2. Meet Helen Walton (G.Games, 200+ titles, multiplayer slots)

Host:  We’re diving into the big gaps in the industry, and joining us is Helen Walton, who left the beauty world to build G.Games from scratch. Now with 200-plus titles and a spot on our GR8 Tech casino Xeno platform, she’s reshaping gameplay with multiplayer slots and pushing for more diversity and innovation in iGaming.

Guest:  This is a lot comfier than my van. Very exciting. I’m in a comfy car.

Host:  Buckle up. Helen, first of all, welcome to our new show, Bet It Drives.

Guest:  Thank you.

[01:18]  3. From “newcomer” to 10+ years in iGaming

Host:  I bet it’s not your first time at iGB.

Guest:  Alas, no.

Host:  I was told you’re still a newcomer to this industry, but it’s 10-plus years.

Guest:  I’d like to pretend to be a newcomer. I sometimes present myself as this scrappy little new company, so new, such an outsider. But really, I just can’t say that anymore.

Host:  You’re a veteran.

Guest:  Oh god. No.

[01:53]  4. If G.Games were a person…

Host:  Some easy starting questions. If G.Games were a person walking through iGB between the stands, G.Games personified as a company, what would they be like?

Guest:  First of all, G would definitely be taking the mickey out of everything, because the founders and the people in the company are way too irreverent. Nothing delights us more than poking fun at how everyone tends to look a bit the same at these shows. We were the company famous for putting guys in high heels saying “play differently,” and grannies with branded Zimmer frames. They’d be looking out for customers, definitely looking at competitors and going, “that’s interesting, what’s everyone else doing,” and calling that innovation.

Host:  What we observe in this industry is often far from innovation. We like copycats, repeating ourselves, watching over the shoulder at what the competition is doing.

Guest:  Yeah.

[03:04]  5. Failure stories & why Helen shares them

Host:  Your career wasn’t always smooth. The way your company looks now, different and innovative, didn’t appear on the first attempt. Your LinkedIn is full of stories, I hate to say disaster stories. Why do you show your disaster stories?

Guest:  First of all, I’m English, and English people can only tell self-deprecating stories. We’re fundamentally incapable of any other kind. And you’re in London, so you’re going to get a lot of self-deprecating humour. We were a tiny scrappy company that knew nothing. None of the three founders had truly worked in the industry. We didn’t know who to ask for advice, how to find our first customer, or where to get financing.

Host:  But good timing. Eleven years ago was good timing.

Guest:  It worries me, how have we not got bigger than we are? But we’ve always tried to do things differently, and when you try to innovate, you often fail. Innovation is by definition risky, and you fail more often than you succeed. The thing I’m really proud of is that, in spite of lots of failures, we’ve survived. We keep going through an incredibly loyal workforce and by keeping everything really lean, so we can keep trying things, fail, and try again. So here we are building software and creating games, taking five years for our current multiplayer product to get to market.

Host:  That leads into one of my next questions, about multiplayer slots.

[05:05]  6. What is a multiplayer slot?

Host:  What is a multiplayer slot?

Guest:  When people say multiplayer, it’s a very big umbrella, and they include a lot of different things. Some crypto sites do battle bonuses where people pool their bonus money, very high volatility, winner takes all, but in many ways that’s just a classic leaderboard. Some people mean bet-behind or bet-alongside, where a streamer bets big and you bet smaller amounts alongside them, so when they win, you win. Others mean a bonus or jackpot shared between a few friends, which isn’t unlike things that already exist in the casino. As far as I know, we are the only company doing true competitive battle slots, where what you do actually impacts another player, not just a tournament or a leaderboard. It’s a true battle royale, and our product is called 99 Royale.

Host:  Following your career, you moved from the fashion industry into iGaming.

[06:27]  7. From the fashion industry to iGaming

Guest:  Like a lot of things, it was accidental. I was running my own agency and got a call to meet an agile consultancy. I said, “Why on earth do you want me?” They said they wanted someone who’s good at talking to customers and could give it an interesting tone of voice, and they’d heard I had interesting ideas on agile. I thought, “That was me talking at a dinner the other night after a bottle of wine. I’ve got interesting ideas on almost everything after a bottle of wine.” So I met them, and that’s how I started working with Paul and Dan, my future co-founders. We got on really well and built a product together. We were so sick of telling companies how they should work differently and being completely ignored. They’d all say “yes, agile, yes, autonomous teams,” but really they were doing the same old command and control. So we decided to do it ourselves, because we thought we could do better.

Host:  What do you think has made you successful in this industry?

[07:45]  8. What made her succeed?

Guest:  Really, it was the ability to keep going while we learned. It’s not that experience has no value, of course it does, and it can shortcut things. It’s that anything new can be learned. Take building a network: it’s not that already having one isn’t helpful, of course it is, but you can build a network. We proved we could, from knowing nobody to now knowing lots of people in the industry. Almost everything people value from experience can be found another way. There are things you can’t teach, things natural to someone’s character, and we value those more. As a company and an individual, I really value being prepared to learn, being good at learning, and being hardworking. If you’ve got those, pretty much everything else you can find.

Host:  I agree. The industry is so dynamic and fast-paced that all your past experience can lose value if you don’t adapt and keep learning, change for the good, and put new ideas into practice.

[09:10]  9. Helen’s soundtrack picks

Host:  Let’s get a bit more personal, like music. If a soundtrack described your career story, what would it be?

Guest:  I’ll pick “No New Friends” by LSD. That would be my song, because it’s got a bit of a gambling flavour.

Host:  If a soundtrack described a big win or a victory?

Guest:  It’s more of a resilience one, but I’d go with something like Chumbawamba. Showing my age, I know.

Host:  And the song on your mind when something isn’t going as planned?

Guest:  Funnily enough, that’s when you need the most comfort. So I’d pick something by RAYE, her “Worth It” song. It’s comforting, and it makes me think about being in the car driving with my daughter, her playing me new songs and increasing my musical education.

[10:40]  10. Early morning boxing at conferences

Host:  Remembering your last media event with boxing, where you were sparring with Lee.

Guest:  Lee runs a big session for people to come and do early-morning boxing networking. The idea is a healthier conference: rather than staying out late drinking, you get up early, do a proper workout, do some sparring, and enjoy yourself. It starts at 7:30 in the morning, so it’s pretty intense. I’ll have to get up early to be there.

[11:21]  11. Weirdest iGaming experiences

Host:  What are the weirdest places gambling, or iGaming, has taken you?

Guest:  I’ve been to some pretty obscure, weird, dingy casinos over the years. I’ll never forget the first time we went to Gibraltar. We had no revenue yet, so all three of us were travelling on our own dime, and we hadn’t earned for over a year. It was painful, so we were looking for somewhere cheap to stay. Paul found this little boat and said, “It’s really usefully near the offices.” But it was tiny, I called it a dinghy, with no shower. So in the morning we had to walk along the quay to a shower block at the end. Unfortunately, “near where we’d be having meetings” meant we were walking past the windows of the customer we were about to try and sell to, wrapped in a towel, all of us with our little sponge bags. I was seriously questioning my life choices at that point.

[12:38]  12. Brutally honest client feedback

Host:  Since you work a lot with innovation and experimenting, what’s the most brutally honest feedback you’ve had from a client?

Guest:  “Your games are [expletive] and our players hate them, and we all hate them.” We also get players writing in, normally because they’ve been losing and they’re angry, and we actually often try to answer them.

Host:  Was there feedback you could genuinely take on board?

Guest:  We try to be brutally honest with ourselves. We’re competing against much larger, much better-funded studios, and we’re aware that a game’s performance is often not about the game itself. It’s about the position it has on the website, the promotion put behind it, all the things that live around a game. If you can’t compete on those, you have to do something different. One reason we’re an innovative company always trying to do something different and interesting is that we know that’s really the only place we can compete.

Host:  Our industry is also known for buzzwords.

[14:01]  13. Buzzwords Helen would ban

Host:  If you could ban a buzzword, what would it be?

Guest:  It’s whatever the latest craze is that drives me insane. Right now I’d love to stop a lot of people talking about AI, because I’ve read enough: everyone jumping on the same bandwagon, and nobody actually prepared to talk about what they really do. Gamification was the one a few years ago that I was sick of hearing. As if you’re not producing games anyway. Shouldn’t games be fun in their own right? If games “need to be gamified,” that should be a bit of a giveaway that you’re doing something wrong.

[14:46]  14. Network or Not Work

Host:  We have a fun little section called “Network or Not Work.” Network if you like the idea, not work if you hate it. You go into a sparring match and your partner immediately starts pitching to you.

Guest:  Oh, network. It’s fine. God knows I’ve bothered people enough at inappropriate times. I’m more than happy to pay that back.

Host:  You’re invited to a sponsored dinner about inclusion and equality, but all five companies are represented by men.

Guest:  Network. If I never went to dinners sponsored by all-male boards, I’d never go to any dinners. And what a perfect opportunity for them to realise they need me on their board.

Host:  Skipping the expo completely and only going to the afterparties for networking.

Guest:  I know plenty of people who do that, but not me. Not work.

Host:  So you’d do both, the expo and the afterparties.

Guest:  Full package all the way.

Host:  Another one. Some guys pretend to be super partners who want to sign a cool deal, but you realise it’s only about the next sponsorship they expect from you.

Guest:  They’re going to be very disappointed, because we basically never sponsor anything. Poor souls. I’d take it all away and let them feel the pain later.

[17:06]  15. Closing thoughts on founder relationships

Host:  Helen, we’ve had a pretty good ride. Any thoughts from it, anything we missed?

Guest:  The best thing about work in general is that if the people you work with are exciting and challenging, and you enjoy spending time with them and they make you laugh, then pretty much everything else follows. That doesn’t mean you get along all the time. Often it means you’re fighting, because the creative collaborative process can be filled with tension. But when you respect them, that carries you. I’ve always said things can be going badly in the company but I can feel incredibly happy, because I feel we’re doing quality work together. And things can be going really well while we’re going through a period of terrible tension that feels painful.

Host:  Especially for the founders.

Guest:  No one talks about founder relationships, maybe because it’s not that common in life. I really feel for people when their business ends, or even when it ends well and they get acquired, but the product they cared about so much hasn’t come out, or hasn’t worked the way they wanted. Everyone tends to go, “Oh, you’re great, you’ll be okay, you’ll smash it.” That’s not very helpful. We’d know not to do that if someone got divorced. We wouldn’t say “plenty more fish in the sea.” People need to be able to mourn, to take a moment for something they’ve poured so much energy, creativity and passion into.

Host:  You work together for such a long time, you’re bound to have cycles, times when things are going really well and times when they change. But if you still have that basic respect, that gets you through. Thank you, Helen.

Guest:  Thank you. This is the best Sunday ride around London I’ve ever had.

Host:  Helen’s story shows us that being brave and smart can lead to big rewards. That’s it for today’s episode of Bet It Drives, a show about the people who drive iGaming forward.