Can you sum up Black Cow and what it offers to operators and suppliers in one paragraph?
Black Cow is a software and technology company that builds, supplies, maintains and supports software for operators, suppliers and other stakeholders. That software is for remote game servers and our flagship offering is our Open Gaming Architecture RGS. Essentially, it allows customers to take control of their own gaming platform across three core areas – single-player gaming, multiplayer gaming and jackpot gaming – and to develop and deploy their own games.
Your Open Gaming Architecture remote game server sounds like a powerful beast. Can you outline its key capabilities?
OGA’s key capability is its flexibility. It allows the customer to take as much control as they want over the platform and their games pipeline. It contains a game development kit which allows the customer to easily build their own game engines and have total control over that aspect or the game development kit can be distributed to their partners so they too can build game engines for their products. We can also use the GDK to build engines for them. There really are no limits to the features and games that the platform can support – table games, slots, instants, etc – it can literally be used for any type of single-player game.
OGA has been out in the wild for more than eight years now and is used by some of the biggest operators in the business, making it proven across countless integrations. It has taken billions of bets – in just one operator in one US state it’s processed more than eight billion bets, to give you an idea of the volume it can handle.
Jackpots are rising in popularity. How is Black Cow helping operators tap into the growing demand for this type of content?
Once we’d got OGA established, we then added a Jackpot RGS to our offering. It has the exact same philosophy behind it as our single-player RGS, and that is to be incredibly flexible and to allow for any type of jackpot to be added to any type of game. This is possible because all the jackpot logic is inside the game engine and not the jackpot server. This in turn enables our jackpot server to be connected to any RGS, but if you connect it to our OGA single-player RGS, it’s possible to add any kind of jackpot feature to an existing game or a brand-new title.
How can operators use your OGA Jackpot to differentiate?
So operators can add their own jackpot capabilities and features to existing games in the lobby, even if the studios behind those games have not included jackpot functionality.
Essentially, this means operators can run unique jackpots that players can’t find anywhere else either because of the way the jackpot is triggered or played, contributed to or won. This is a really powered differentiator and is undoubtedly why we have seen significant interest in OGA Jackpots over the last few years.
How is your technology powering the games and experiences of the future? And what role will multiplayer content have in the future?
There has been a surge in interest for multiplayer product and this type of content will absolutely play a key role in the future. Black Cow already has a multiplayer remote game server which is based around a lot of the principles of our single-player RGS and has seen a real spike in interest from both operators and suppliers in recent months.
I think a lot of this interest has come because we are renowned for the flexibility we offer across our solutions but underpinned by unrivalled stability. This means our partners can build their own games and game engines without any restrictions on what they can do. At the moment, most people are thinking about multiplayer in terms of products that already exist but there’s a whole bunch of stuff that no one has thought about yet, experiences that are more like Fortnite than online slots – and our Multiplayer OGA can facilitate that.
There’s a whole paradigm for multiplayer yet to be discovered and we are super excited to see just how far operators and suppliers can push OGA’s capabilities to deliver this next generation of content.
Innovation can be expensive and risky. How does OGA help mitigate these risks?
You’re right. It’s important for operators and developers to be able to experience and push boundaries, but this often means taking a risk and investing significant resources into a project.
While most companies want to be innovative, they also know they will make good money by offering popular games and themes with proven mechanics, bonuses and features. But the flexibility built into OGA makes it easy for operators to develop, experiment and get games live.
This then provides a huge learning opportunity with the responses and feedback being used to tweak features and make improvements but at very little cost. This is because we have embraced rapid application development, which is all about quickly and cheaply producing something that we can get out there and see how people respond. You then iterate on that product and keep changing it based on the feedback received.
This is incredibly powerful as it enables true innovation that gives people what they want next, rather than being distracted by what they might want eventually.
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