PROFILE / MFORTUNE
majority coming from its 24/7 customer support team
based in the Birmingham head office. And it's no small
operation. The last available annual report recorded a
operating profit of £5.7m from revenues of £16.5m.
But it retains the feel of a start-up and Wilson
describes the senior management structure, with
himself as CEO and co-founder Emil Nestor as CTO, as
slick and lean. “We are a very private company still run
by the founders and decisions are immediate,” he says.
In many ways mFortune is at odds with the
traditional egaming sector. While many firms talk of
"mobile first" thinking, few actually live and breathe
mobile. At mFortune the entire focus of the company is
on the mobile platforms from technology to acquisition
marketing and even CRM. Its apps are also simple, single
slots games for the most part rather than the hulking
all-in-one casino apps toted by most of their peers.
But the image of the firm as a self-described
“scrappy start-up” is increasingly out of date, and there
is a concerted effort to transition to become a major
player within the egaming sector.
A big part of this is an investment in technology. The
firm took a huge step forward over the past 12 months
with the launch of desktop versions of its games. The
games were effectively “reverse engineered” from
mobile in a move that is almost exactly the opposite to
its big UK rivals who have been packaging up a desktop
experience into mobile.
SCREENS NOT PLATFORMS
The shift from the mobile-only gaming experience to
a PC-friendly HTML5 platform is a significant one for
mFortune. And it’s not one that has come easily, with
a huge amount of development resource poured into
making the multi-platform experience work.
“We have taken all of our mobile learning and
put that onto the desktop,” Simon Llanos, head of
marketing and business development, says. “The
seamless experience is important to us. On tablet
and desktop we try and give the same experience as
you get on mobile. The buttons are bigger and the
background and in-game graphics might be different
but it’s more about adding Easter egg experiences
rather than changing the dynamic of the game. If you
get it right on mobile that experience translates to
tablet and desktop very well. Everyone talks about a
multi-screen strategy, but they are all just screens.”
It's also testament to the growing confidence the
firm has in the quality of its games. There is no doubt
mFortune had a reputation within the industry as a
rough and ready mobile gaming experience, but Llanos
insists that has changed dramatically during 2014. While
some of its older mobile slot games may not fare too
well when put against the 3D spectaculars emerging
from some of the desktop-focused suppliers, the newer
games more than hold their own.
“We’ve gone through a painful learning process and
we’ve built ourselves a niche now where the gameplay
is really immersive and it works on 3G. The games
weren’t always as immersive as we would have liked
them to be, but now we’ve figured out how to serve
every device, how to get games out quickly and how to
create games that players really love.”
But Llanos insists this doesn’t mean leaving anyone
behind. “A lot of our competitors call themselves
60
mFORTUNE
IN NUMBERS
o
100
Total staff over its
three offices
o
£16.5M
Revenue for 12 months
ended July 2013
o
99.9%
Availability in the UK
mobile phone market
of mFortune's games
o
7
The number of years
mFortune has been
operating
mobile, but you aren’t truly mobile if you don’t support
every device available. You can play our games on
99.9% of devices and we want to be available to
everyone.” This means still supporting a large number of
customers without an iOS or Android device.
“We want to continue to service those customers,”
Llanos says. “Some of our competitors only cater for
the last two years of devices, but there are lots of
customers who are happy with their flip phone. The
Java side of the market is pretty much exclusive to
us, and we do pretty well out of it. We make sure the
games look good on iPhones, but we also make sure
they look good on Java phones as well.”
DIFFERENT BY DESIGN
Llanos estimates around 30% of its current customer
base are heavy Java users, although he concedes that
percentage is getting smaller with each passing month.
"As time goes on the lion’s share of our users come
from iOS and Android, and there is no getting away
from that," he says. But it's a significant proportion of its
revenues, and a captive market that is currently beyond
many of its big name competitors. So are the likes of
888, Paddy Power and Hills simply throwing money
away? No, says Llanos.
"We are the only ones doing it because it's really
hard," he says. "It’s only really been in the past year it’s
become more of a benefit than a burden to us. When
you are trying to support those phones it can restrict
what you are trying to do on the iPhone and Android
devices. The reason we are successful is through
perseverance."
It's also one of the clear benefits of owning a unique
technology platform. The likes of William Hill, Betfair
and Paddy Power have made much of their in-house
content driving revenues during 2014 and Llanos says
it’s an increasingly important differentiator. “Now that
everyone has the same game it encourages players to
move around chasing bonuses, and you have to ask
yourself if that is the type of player that you want?”
mFortune is as much a technology firm as a gambling
one with the company’s office in Romania generating
its content and back end systems, and a newly opened
office in Hungary working on the front-end, SEO and
some digital marketing. Very little is outsourced with
just payment processing and identity verification
conducted by third parties. All back office, CRM,
marketing and software development is done in-house.
“It’s puts us in a pretty unique position,” Llanos
says. “Our structure makes us very robust in terms of
allowing us to generate good income from smallervalue players.” Its financial results bear this out with
a comfortable 35% profit margin despite its scale.
But is it a blessing or a curse? “It’s a blessing,” Llanos
says, “but it’s about staying on top of the technology
development funnel and we are big on agile structures
at the moment.”
He admits it limits the firm when it comes to
competing with the likes of Playtech and NetEnt as
the current development cycle sees two new games
released a month. "If we tapped into third-party
suppliers it's almost unlimited. But we took the decision
to never have every game switched on at one time,
so we are happy with limited availability," he says.
W W W. E G R M A G A Z I N E . C O M