HungryBear – real-money Slot Masters Q&A

In the dynamic online gaming sphere, HungryBear stands out as a true trailblazer, spearheading innovation in game design and development with its Slot Masters product. Hailed as the very first multiplayer slot game on the market, it is now set to further revolutionise the online casino sector with an upcoming real-money version, alongside a peer-to-peer mechanic that will allow players to go head-to-head with their friends as they battle for prizes.

Here Justin Chamberlain, HungryBear’s CEO, delves into the development journey behind the upcoming real-money Slot Masters and discusses how it is set to change the face of slot gaming in exciting ways.

Why is there such demand for multiplayer slots right now?

I’d like to think that the buzz and discussion – which there is a lot of – is primarily being driven by us. I’ve seen a lot of people popping up on different podcasts and in different interviews talking about multiplayer being the future, and a lot of people are promising that it’s coming. But, as we sit here right now, we’re still the only multiplayer slots offering in the space.

We’ve established the genre and proved that there’s appetite from the player. We recently hit 1.6 million unique players across our network in 12 months, and they’ve played approximately 1.3 billion spins. I’ve insisted from day one that single-player slots have a limitation – certainly demographically, as younger audiences have grown up playing multiplayer games such as Minecraft and Fortnite. For people up to 25, maybe 30 years of age, all they know and all they want to play is multiplayer, and I think that translates to this space now.

Let’s look at Slot Masters itself as a product. For those who aren’t familiar with it, how does the concept work?

At its heart it’s still a slot, so a slot player is going to understand the game when they first start playing. It’s a set of reels, they spin and you collect points instead of cash, as it’s not real money yet. That was a really important, fundamental piece of bringing this product to market after 20 years of developing slots. One thing I’ve learned is that slot players don’t like a game that doesn’t look like a slot. You can build a game on a slot engine but if it doesn’t look like a slot, typically, they won’t play it. We came to market with that principle at the forefront of our product.

On top of that, it allows for three players to play together and instead of all passively spinning and scoring points upon a leaderboard, Slot Masters allows players to steal points from each other in a timed, typically two-minute window. For example, me, you and somebody else would join a game together, with two minutes to score points. We’ve each got an equal number of weapons available to us – I can bomb your points back to zero, or I can steal your 10,000 points. You can steal them back, raid half your points, or freeze game windows.

Ultimately, it’s still a slot, but it takes those competitive, gamification elements and brings them into play – and that is exciting. Where we’re heading in the future is building a real peer-to-peer game, where I can invite you and a friend to come and play in one game together. That “playing against a friend” element will take it to another level.

What’s the challenge in making that a reality? Does it require a change in the product development process?

It’s in development right now. What we had to bring to market first was a really simplified version of the product. The game was originally designed around ten years ago, but we couldn’t bring it to market then as processing power in mobile phones wasn’t strong enough, and it just wasn’t possible. We took Slot Masters back off the shelf around two years ago and decided right now is the time to do it. There wasn’t a demand for multiplayer ten years ago, but what we had to bring to market was the easiest, simplest version of this product, and that’s what you see on Ladbrokes and other sites.

There’s no risk to the player – they enter for nothing and get the chance to win free spins. The next step of where we’re headed is that product in real money, and peer-to-peer. That’s in development right now. We’ve overcome the biggest challenge so far, and that was just the initial step of bringing a multiplayer product into a live environment. It doesn’t matter how good your product is in internal tests – you don’t know if it’ll stand up until you put it live with an operator.

Today, there will be between 35,000-40,000 people playing Slot Masters. We have to learn how to stand up to that volume, because each one of those players on average is playing 12 times a day. All of these games are happening simultaneously, and our servers can be absolutely hammered by database requests and so forth. Learning how to do that and deliver a stable solution for the operator is the hardest part. Moving that to real money is relatively simple in comparison – the biggest challenge is certification, and then moving that to peer-to-peer isn’t a huge step.

You have a sportsbook version of Slot Masters live with Ladbrokes – Clash of the Day. How is that being perceived by bettors instead of typical casino slot players?

Really well! The original idea behind that product came after the sports betting team at Ladbrokes approached us. They’d seen the success on the casino side, and it was pitched as an opportunity to put a slot game in a sportsbook setting for the very first time, which typically they don’t do. We went into a pretty substantial six-month development period with that team to make the product fit their fanzone system and appeal to the typical sports betting punter.

One of the most unique things about Clash of the Day is that you get to play as your Premier League team. When you become a Fanzone member on Ladbrokes, you tell them what your chosen team is and play on their behalf. We took that a step further with OPAP in Greece, where they wanted a certain leaderboard system – so not only do you play on behalf of your team for daily prizes, you also play on a second leaderboard to help drive your team to the top.

That’s one way we’ve moved our product into a much bigger part of the industry. We’ve only just gone live with these versions, but they’re going to be a very big part of our sales for next year. Football is only one skin of this product, but we’re talking to a lot of people in different jurisdictions about re-skinning it for basketball, American football, ice hockey and so on. I think it’ll be a big one for us next year, because of the amount of permutations we can drive off the back of that.

In terms of a real-money version of Slot Masters, is it a case of working alongside game studios and their IPs, or are you developing your own content around that?

The main deal we have now is with Blueprint, which is just beginning to bear fruit. We’re readying a launch in December with a big tier-one operator who I won’t name yet. The real money version will bleed into those IP deals, but at the moment, the demand we’ve had from operators is purely for the real-money version of the product because it is working so well as a free-to-play acquisition engagement tool. We know the players are there, and we know they engage every day, so the operators and HungryBear are all very confident that once we’ve got a real-money version, they’ll convert to spend on that same product.

We now have the green light from GLI (Gaming Labs International) that the Slot Masters version we submitted to them for testing is compliant with UK regulations, so we now know that we can bring the product to market. We’ve pioneered and led with free-to-play, and we’re still the only offering in the market. We’re now working on the real-money build for this game which is really exciting.