Since its debut in London at ICE 2020, Woohoo Games has been on the fast track onward and upward. This new development studio specializes in online games including innovative slots. The London based company is currently active in the Indian and South East Asian markets, but we’re thrilled to hear that the footprint is growing rapidly. With that said, keep an eye out for the availability of the portfolio in additional regions soon. Most recently, the studio launched several new games last month (July 2020) and secured a slew of partnerships over the course of the year. Ed Whittington, Head of Business Development at Woohoo, chatted with us to educate LCB’ers about the offerings and what’s to come.
Q: It’s been an exciting launch year for you so far. Please give LCB’ers an overview of Woohoo.
A: It certainly has been exciting! We only publicly launched Woohoo at ICE in February and our feet haven’t touched the ground since! In the following months, we signed commercials with 15 different aggregators and platforms, launched 8 new games in July, so we are really gathering momentum here. Alongside building our slot content, we are developing hyper-localized games for specific regions. The Woohoo team is not only industry specialists, but players themselves at heart, and as such we have been able to build an amazing team, totally committed to bringing something new and exciting to the players. In these hugely competitive markets, it can be really difficult to be relevant and stand out, so it’s been fantastic to experience such an appetite for our content. We believe this is testament to the quality of the games that the team is producing, combined with the fact that we have a tailored approach to bringing genuinely unique content to the market – but I guess it’s like any business, care enough about the consumer and you’re halfway there!
Q: Where are headquarters located and which markets do you currently serve?
A: The HQ is based in London, with development centres in Ukraine and Spain. Being a new studio, our market coverage is growing weekly, but currently, our main markets are India and South East Asia.
Q: Tell us more about your secret formula – surprise, engage and reward.
A: For the team at Woohoo, the first step was data and market analysis, leading to a targeted approach to genuinely unique content. As I said earlier, the market is so competitive, that, without true innovation, games studios are really just treading very overcrowded water! So, whilst we do have traditional slot and table game content, we wanted to balance this with hyper-localized content for specific markets. Initially, we focused on India – which is absolutely exploding at the moment, and through market research we were able to identify a clear gap in the market, leading to us offering 5 localized Indian games as part of our launch portfolio. We found that, although there are lots of ‘live’ Indian games, there are virtually no RNG games, so if for example, you want to play the hugely popular, traditional Indian card game, ‘Teen Patti’, we are the studio that can offer that. We always try to appreciate what the players want, wherever they are in the world so that our content can resonate in these hugely diverse and desirable markets. This localized approach, which has proved so successful, is something that we are in the process of replicating in other markets, so watch this space!!
Q: Several integrations have taken place this year. What has been the most significant partnership?
A: It’s been a crazily busy year, with integrations coming thick and fast - we are already live with some the largest aggregators in the business, such as Solid gaming, QTech and Markor Tech (formally Nektan). On top of this, we have commercials already agreed with many more aggregators and platforms, with whom we are really excited to go live within the coming months.
Q: Walk us through game development from concept to fruition.
A: Since our initial success was really driven by our localized approach to content, and really caring about the players’ satisfaction, it’s important to us to that this ethos runs through all aspects of the developmental process. We build separate development streams for each market, allowing teams to be fully immersed in the culture of the market and really understand the end-user. As an example of the lengths we go to, taking India as an example – It’s such a huge country, that in order to be in a position to offer games that would resonate with players specifically in their own regions, we had to analyze all the cultural variations that exist in different areas, so user satisfaction was guaranteed. So, you can see that it’s a truly in-depth approach that Woohoo have taken, but the rewards are self-evident - remarkable traction very quickly, in much sought after territories. Of course, there are certain types of games that are regarded as a safe bet with most games studios, and Woohoo offers these too, but even in this area, we try hard to innovate and attempt to predict market trends by looking at what the players are enjoying. For example, we saw that one of the biggest video game launches of the year was ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ – this led to us producing our fantastic ‘Cyberpunk Wars’ which will capitalize on the popularity of this theme on its release later this year. Undoubtedly, some of our success here has been down to our amazing artistic development team, who stylistically strip our games back, so they are clean, simple, and mobile-friendly. Finally, we are keen to learn from our content and give a truly enjoyable experience to the players, so our games are rigorously tested by consumer groups for playability and ‘stickiness’ – a process that is clearly paying off for Woohoo.
Q: In terms of slot games, please give us an overview of some of the features.
A: Initially, we have been focusing on emerging markets, so the functionality in our games has needed to reflect and cater for those specific less advanced audiences. Our games play with a mix of classic proven features, such a ‘Free Spins’, ‘Wild features’, 'Multipliers', 'Double-ups' and ‘Randomizers’ ... together with innovative features that we create exclusively to enhance the gameplay of some slots. For example, in our new game, Penguins Paradise, we have a cool new feature where the spins can freeze, creating even more free spins, which, needless to say, has been really popular with the players! We know innovation is the key, so as we move into new more mature markets the team has some great feature ideas up their sleeve that we are really excited to showcase in future releases.
Q: We always look forward to new game releases. What’s coming next from Woohoo?
We have a really busy roadmap ahead, with awesome dragon and elephant themed games being released over the next few months. The team have also just shared a brand new steam punk themed, ‘Wheel of Fortune’ style game, reminiscent of the ‘Bioshock’ video game, which I think they’ve absolutely nailed! The exciting design and artwork create real atmosphere, which will provide a truly immersive experience for the players. Now we have a solid base library of games, we are focusing on introducing variety in the type of content and of course innovation, once again, will allow us to get cut through, in the really competitive markets.