iGaming Daily

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Online Casino's biggest payout, the reclaiming of a top spot, the company's biggest launch ever and an $85 million acquisition. These are just a few things to describe Evolution's second quarter activities. Yet why did the firm's CEO, Martin Kulson, describe their Q2 performance as just quote unquote solid? This will be what we'll be exploring in today's episode of iGaming Daily presented by OptiMove.

as I'm joined by Casino Beats and Slot Beats senior journalist Danny Lee to explore Evolutions second quarter results and activities over the last few months. Danny, how are you doing today? okay? Yeah, I'm not bad. You know, this is actually, I think the third podcast in a row where I've been talking about this supplier and all this talk about Evolutions got me feeling a bit like Charles Darwin at the moment. I hate that so much. How long were you preparing that line? well, two days maybe.

My fun question was going to be, what was your favourite game under the Evolution banner? But now I'm probably going to ask you, what part of the Evolution chain are you on? Well, to answer your first question, I noticed, I think I noticed yesterday actually that they're bringing a sequel out for what's one of my favourite games under the Evolution banner, which is No Limit Cities, Blood and Shadow, a fun sort of horror game that I think came out last year or the year before, so it's good to know that they're...

They saw some potential in a sequel and I'm going to look forward to that coming out, Blood and Shadow 2. I'm more concerned about where you are in the evolution timeline. Somewhere between an ape and a man, I think. Not quite man, not quite ape. I would love to be the little tadpole that comes out of the water first. It's quite a chill life. I'll let you my... I want to say it's my favourite game, but it's the game that I remember playing the most and it was Dragon's Look and...

It's quite simple. I love fantasy and RPG elements of any sort. And I remember playing this game in Pokerstar's Metaverse Casino. It was with like fake money, but I was just in this, on like seeing all my avatars playing this game on machine. And it was about 11 o 'clock at night. And I was like, I've just been working.

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like on the slots for the last six, seven hours. And I was spending the evening playing them. like, time to put the headset down. Well, that was it. And we are going to talk about evolution, but before we do, now is an appropriate time to mention the supporter of the iGaming Daily podcast. And that's OptiMove, the number one CIRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. For listeners out there, I recently did a podcast with Shai Frank from OptiMove looking at their generosity marketing.

blog series that they did. Give it a listen. It's a great insight from Shy. And there's also links in that podcast description for the blog series. A very in -depth read. I highly advise if you don't listen to the podcast, at least read that blog series because it is certainly for you marketers out there. Really insightful. And for the listeners, you can still sign up for a free month of OptiMove by going to www .optimove .com forward slash SBC.

I will leave all the links in the description below. Now, Danny, on to Evolution and we'll start with the most recent news that they've published their Q2 2024 results. This was last week. How did the company perform over the last three months? Yeah, well, they performed fairly well across the quarter. Like you said, the CEO referred to results as solid, which, you could say they are. Operating revenues were up over 15 % compared to the same quarter last year. So that's quite steady growth.

coming in at 508 .4 million euros. Bits also climbed across the quarter as well, rising by 10 .9 % to 345 million euros. So yeah, quite steady results, but I believe there were some sort of large payouts, particularly coming from the live casino titles that maybe stunted a bit of revenue growth as well. But we'll touch on that in a moment. despite that, revenue from

live casino did increase quite substantially by 18 % year over year in Q2 2024 compared to the same period last year. However, looking at the sort of random, well the RNG segment, obviously they've got quite a few slot studios under the belt with Net -N, No Limit City, Red Tiger and another name that I've lost. Is it just Alluge? It did, yeah.

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That's annoying me now. Anyway, moving on. Yeah, that segment for the RNG games only saw growth of 2%, which isn't obviously that substantial, but growth is growth at the end of the day. you kind of already touched upon it that this second quarter witnessed Evolution pay out a record payout of its crazy time game, which it has contributed to slow growth.

I think this is the first time we've actually heard a record payment impacting its quarterly growth. And this is why Carlson did say that it's not fully reflecting of their operational performance. But what did the higher ups within the company have to say about the results? Yeah, so they, like we said, had been described as solid by Carlson. He said that he sees the financial result in the quarter solid, although not fully reflecting its operational performance.

He outlined some clear reasons for this, stating that the large payouts that they witnessed from their crazy time game, a sort of money wheel live casino game show, contributed to sort of less or lower revenue share for the period. Despite all of this, he did sort of remain positive about the prospects for the rest of the year, stating that the underlying market drivers and demand for its market -leading products

remain very strong. they've remained positive, but you can tell there's maybe sort of an air of disappointment in the fact that it could have been quite more substantial if they hadn't have been sort of, I guess you could say they were unlucky in the amount of payouts that they had to hand out due to crazy time wins. But again, that can just show how popular of a game that is with lots of people playing it to obviously get those payouts. Yeah, I

I've got the number in front of me here and it's 34 .5 million euros. That's the record set on like CINO payout, which put it into perspective. They recently just spent 85 million dollars on Galaxy gaming. That's just under half of what they paid for that company. So put it in context of how big a payout they have done is, it is quite huge. Definitely. So you've already mentioned kind of their appetite for new markets.

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And this is within Evolution's financial results. Carlson said he was optimistic due to the investment the company have made in developing new markets, a strategy that he thinks will pay off in the long run. What are the company's plans when it comes to the global expansion and how has it been working towards these goals in previous quarters? Yeah, so it looks like they've stopped targeting markets that are regulating rather than regulated. So it's been investing in

such as the Philippines, Brazil and Czech Republic as well. Obviously Brazil is a market that lots of suppliers and operators are looking at right now waiting for that regulation to fully come through because of the sort of massive potential that it presents. But looking in Europe and actually on the Czech Republic specifically, it did sort of prepare to launch a new live casino studio in the Czech Republic.

Although not launched in this quarter, it sounds like they've achieved a lot of developments towards it being launched before the end of the year. Students describe as a relatively small studio, but a new Prague -based studio would be sort of huge for the company. And it has also outlined plans to open between one and two studios ahead of 2025, although they haven't really disclosed where they might be. kind of shifting towards

their products, I already mentioned in the intro that they had their biggest launch ever of a game. This is Lightning Storm, a live casino game show. Where has this been taken live? How successful has it been in the early days? It's going to be hard to tell how it's done so far. It's only recently been launched this week, actually. this week. Just this week, yeah.

So they had plans to launch it in Q2 itself but it sounds like there was maybe a delay or two that meant that it just crept into Q3 for its launch. But yeah, they've touted it as its biggest launch ever and actually Carlisand referred to it as one of the biggest releases ever in the industry. So they're putting quite a lot of sort of pressure on this game to perform well. It's another live casino game show that uses like a money wheel format.

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similar to Crazy Time, which is obviously seeing all these big payouts come out and a lot of activity in the quarter. It's been taken live this week exclusively with Bet MGM in Ontario and it will be quite interesting to see how well it performs with the sort of quotes that they're putting behind this game, how big it is. I think they also said that they demand nothing but perfection for this game.

or nothing but perfection is enough for this game, they said. So yeah, it's going to be an interesting one to look at in the next quarter for the rest of the year and see where it of compares with their other live casino titles. Will it overtake Crazy Time for the amount of activity they get on the game? It's quite an interesting release, definitely. Yeah, they demand perfection and so do I, so I'm going to clarify my introduction and

It is not the biggest game in the second quarter. They've just pushed it towards the third quarter release. But nonetheless, interesting to keep an eye on and definitely for the viewers to look out for on slot beats where Danny will be covering any latest figures that you can get from that game. back to Q2, because obviously this is delved into Q3 with the game launch. The company witnessed some, you can probably call it a typical activity when it came to paying

players over the second quarter. Can you just try and explain what occurred? Yeah, so it's what we've been talking about really with Crazy Time. So, Evolution's second quarter update revealed that there'd been a large number of payouts on Crazy Time and like you said, this was I think around 35 million euros to over 5 ,000 players in Q2. again, Carlson sort of heralded it as the largest payout from one game in online casino history. It's hard to sort of fact check

that and sort of compare it to other sort of payouts that we've seen. numbers itself is, you wouldn't call it an accurate claim, but it's probably a solid claim. It's going to use Carlson's use of Q2 results. Definitely. I mean, you can sort of understand now why we're getting these quotes about how the results have been solid and, but not like a full representation of how much growth

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have actually achieved in this quarter because that is a substantial amount of money being paid out to players. Do we know why this game is paying out? Not to use the word so frequently, but for a Q2 performance with those numbers, more generously was probably the right phrase to use. Yeah, it's difficult to know really. You'd think, has it just been a coincidental thing? Like there's just

a lot of lucky players out there, because obviously with these money wheel games you get to decide what sort of bet you're placing, it's not just like a slot where you spin, you can put a bit of strategy into the different segments of the wheel that you're going to bet on and maybe players just got lucky in that sense, but Carlson did refer to sort of large play wins as being part of the game and essentially a positive thing for their games.

players seeing payouts like these, it's a bit of an attractive thing to know about a game that they're paying out so much money to quite a lot of players. But obviously it does affect the company through lower revenue share in the period and has sort of led to this little bit of disappointment towards the end of Q2. Okay, let's shift our focus then to Galaxy Gaming and Islas Fantini to round off the show. And just on Galaxy Gaming,

We mentioned it was an 85 million dollar acquisition. How can this potential acquisition benefit Evolution moving forward? think it's a great move to be honest for Evolution. Galaxy Gaming are a very established provider of table games in the industry. I think they said that they're licensed in 28 states across the US, which is quite a substantial figure, as well as being

sort of licensed for over 130 different regions worldwide. Now, they've got a huge portfolio already of table games that Evolution can now obviously make use of. And I think, I don't know what you think about the price of the acquisition, but it definitely doesn't feel like Evolution have sort of overpaid if that 85 million figure is correct. We've seen some numbers in the past, certainly within the past

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three years, which have been insanely higher than actually what they're getting with Galaxy gaming. And let's not beat around the bush. They're getting a lot for their money. It seems lower than previously set in the past. I don't know if that's just market circumstances or there's a new asking price for these, or standard price, but it definitely does seem lower than has been in the past, which is great for evolution. They've got, like I said,

great, great deal. They've got Galaxy gaming, hundred, what is it? 130, you said, Yeah. In across the world. Brilliant. 28, license in 28 states. Fantastic. And just the portfolio of games they've got is great. So a really good deal for them. And we are running out of time, but first off, if you hear any ASMR from Danny Lee, it's because he's rubbing his beard against the mic and our producer, Inaya,

Her blood is boiling right now. She's sat next to me like, stop it, stop it. But to round it off before Danny keeps scratching his beard. What is the significance of evolution reclaiming top spot in the suppliers chart in July? I'd like to say first that the beard should be in inverted commas. And you've also been scratching your newly shaved head as well, James. love it. The mayor's just pointed to me now being like, stop it, sorry, I'm so hypocritical.

Yeah, back to Isla's Fantini. Evolution have spent the majority of the year in these reports that look into North American slot stats with specific operators in the country and how well different suppliers are performing. yeah, like I was saying, Evolution have performed really well in these for as long as I've been covering them on Slot Beats at least. And I think it had finished top of the US supplier charts every month this year.

apart from last month. So it's probably just a nice thing for Evolution to see that they've regained that top spot. Their games are clearly still performing quite well in the US and they were up there in the Canada supplier charts as well. And many of their games sort of come into the top 10 games for GGR. So I believe...

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I believe their Live Dealer Roulette game and Live Dealer Baccarat games were both towards the top of those tables and they also had some games performing well in a lot of other charts as well. So yeah, just a nice thing for them to see that they're back at the top of the pile after a bit of a tumultuous period. Like I said, I've been on a couple of podcasts recently to do with Evolution. They've had a bit of trouble with...

Light and Wonder in sort of a copyright case. And they also went through a bit of trouble in Georgia as well with staff planning to go on strike. things are looking a bit brighter, looking a bit better for this podcast today, definitely. For this podcast and hopefully for Evolutions Q3 results, which we will no doubt cover when they do arrive. But that has been it for our Gaming Daily in Evolutions coverage

their second quarter performance. I've been James Ross. I've been joined by Danny Lee and we are both going to go and play some crazy time to get in on this, this payout.