Q&A with Steve Cutler, CEO & co-founder of Kalamba Games

This week we had a quick chat with Steve Cutler, CEO & co-founder of Kalamba Games.

What makes you different to other providers/to what else is available?

Kalamba Games was founded in 2016 by myself and Alex Cohen, two industry experts with experience in both real money gambling and social casino. We identified a gap in the market for a supplier who brought the best of social casino to RMG along with a focus on introducing revenue drivers that help improve operators’ KPIs. Our game design strategy has always been driven by integrating engagement and retention features, as well as world-class promotional mechanics. Our games are proven to increase player engagement and retention by up to six times, as well as having a far slower game degradation and a much higher earning tail than the industry standard. We release one game a month and we now have a portfolio of over 16 high-performing titles.

How are you brining your social gaming experience into the business?

Alex and I between us have over six years’ experience in social gaming and casino and thus, we had a few tricks up our sleeves when we founded Kalamba. We knew what helps drive session length and long-term engagement. A lot of that involves offering features with saved progress and collection mechanics to encourage longer and multiple sessions. With ever-increasing competition, it is less about acquisition but more about retaining the player for a longer time. Our games help ensure this.

What exactly is Kalamba doing to increase player engagement and retention?

Our games have a number of unique and improved in-game features. Among other things these include progressive jackpots and our HyperBet and HyperBonus features, enabling players to adjust game volatility. We know they have different experiences of slots and by allowing the flexibility to set different game modes, you can attract different types of players and also ensure they stay for longer as their skills and comfortability levels increase. This way, the same game can appeal to beginners as well as VIPs. Newcomers with a lower taste for volatility won’t be put off while the game still remains interesting to those who desire higher volatility.

You recently hired a UX expert from the video games industry, could you tell us a bit about the reasoning behind this?

The first two years at Kalamba have been primarily focused on delivering games that get better and better with a highly competitive velocity of one game per month. Most importantly, we coupled this with a legacy-free framework that delivers for all markets and operator requirements. We are now, taking our games to the highest level by bringing on board a pair of highly experienced and talented game UX professionals. Graham McAllsiter joined us from Player Research, a company he founded to provide UX research and playtesting services to the video games industry worldwide, including major studios such as EA, Sony and NaturalMotion. He helped studios deliver successful games by applying scientific methods for objectively evaluating key assumptions about the way a game will be played and experienced. Working with the new Senior UX Product Lead, Andrzej Sekula, who joins at the same time from Huuuge and Vivid Games, he will now do the same for the games we develop at Kalamba and help shape the mindset of the company to create games that deliver the greatest user experience to the players. We are excited that we are now in a very good position to be a highly competitive company within the industry.

What can we expect from Kalamba in 2019?

We will expect to release more than 12 great games with our various engaging in-game features over the year. We received investment from venture capital funds Vereeni and RB Capital at the end of last year and this investment has given us the ability to speed up the time to some of our key business, games and platform goals. There are exciting times ahead