How do you feel mobile optimisation for iGaming has continued to innovate this year now the initial wave has passed?
Today, mobile optimisation goes far beyond adapting a game to a smaller screen. Mobile now shapes the product from the very beginning: the user experience, the placement of key elements, the number of actions within a session, loading speed and how quickly the game responds to the user.
There is also a very practical factor: market conditions. Not every player has access to a stable high-speed connection or the latest smartphone. For an international provider, that means optimisation has to take into account product weight, loading speed, performance on unstable connections and compatibility across different types of devices.
If a game performs well only under ideal technical conditions, its potential is already limited. For me, mobile-first today means building a product around real usage conditions from day one, so it remains fast, intuitive and comfortable to use across different markets.
What elements of mobile gaming can genuinely be introduced into iGaming to improve the user experience?
I would look beyond individual mechanics. What interests us much more is how mobile gaming teams approach product development as a whole: how they work with UX, interaction speed, interface clarity and how naturally a product fits into everyday usage patterns. In mobile gaming, a lot of attention is paid to the interaction itself: how quickly a user understands what is happening, how clearly the product responds to their actions, how the experience evolves over time and whether the gameplay remains engaging after the first interaction.
For iGaming, that is a very useful product perspective. Our industry has traditionally had a strong focus on mathematics, mechanics and commercial efficiency – and those remain fundamental. At the same time, there is still a great deal of room to develop the quality of the gaming experience itself.
That is where we see the potential of Hyper Play. We want to take relevant experience from other gaming segments where it genuinely improves the product and adapt it to the specifics of iGaming rather than simply transferring existing solutions one-to-one.
There is a lot of discussion on balancing customer acquisition and retention nowadays. How do you introduce new formats without disrupting consistent revenue drivers in the modern market?
For a company of our scale, it is important to continue developing the core business while also creating new areas for growth. That is why the timing for Hyper Play felt very natural to us.
Our industry has traditionally had a strong focus on mathematics, mechanics and commercial efficiency and those remain fundamental
Onlyplay already has a strong portfolio, a solid technology base, an international partner network, and an experienced team. Today, we have the resources to make dedicated investments in new products and teams without having to rebuild the entire business around a single hypothesis.
I see new formats as an investment area. First, an idea needs enough room to develop. Then we need to validate the product logic, understand the market response and only after that decide how far it should scale. This allows us to keep working with proven categories that already deliver results for our partners while developing products that could potentially become an important part of the portfolio in the future.
How does Onlyplay decide which experimental formats are worth investing in as fully scaled products?
We have always experimented extensively with mechanics. Piggy Tap, for example, grew out of that willingness to test a different type of interaction and eventually became a fully developed product. As the company has grown, the decision-making process has evolved as well. Today, product intuition is supported by data, mathematics, testing, technological capabilities and commercial logic.
At CEO level, I need to look at the broader picture. Does the product fit our vision? Is there a real place for it in the market? Can we give it the right team, technology and resources? Does the next level of investment make sense?
Sometimes the right decision is to keep developing the product. Sometimes it needs more work. What matters to me is that scaling is driven by strong signals from both the product and the market.
Do you feel the iGaming sector has arrived at something of a technological crossroads, where providers are on the lookout for new mechanics on a wider scale?
I think the timing is very good for this. The market has grown significantly in recent years, the volume of content has become enormous and competition inside operator lobbies has intensified.
Within that environment, simply releasing a new game is no longer enough to guarantee attention. Providers have to think more deeply about how a product is differentiated, what role it can play within an operator’s portfolio and what genuinely new experiences it brings. That is why we are seeing growing interest in new formats. For Onlyplay, this was also one of the factors behind launching Hyper Play. We may have had the same ambition a few years ago, but today we also have the resources, experience and team to support it properly.
If a game performs well only under ideal technical conditions, its potential is already limited
I think the next few years will be especially interesting because of this. Established categories will continue to evolve, while more space opens alongside them for new product directions.
What can you tell us about your recent rebrand, new product releases, and plans for the year ahead?
For us, the rebrand started with a very simple realisation: the company had already changed, but the visual identity had not kept pace. I saw that especially clearly at ICE Barcelona 2026. By that point, Onlyplay had become much stronger technically, our art and production standards had grown significantly, we had built a much broader product ecosystem and the company itself had become a more mature and scalable partner for the market. Visually, however, we were still representing an earlier version of ourselves in many ways.
We decided to rethink the system as a whole. It was important to preserve the elements that had already become recognisable, including the circular target in the logo, while giving the brand more character, colour and room for expression. We refreshed the typography, graphic language, exhibition approach, characters and merchandise. What matters to me is that this was never just a decorative exercise. The rebrand reflects what had already happened inside Onlyplay. We have become more systematic in product development, stronger technologically and much clearer about how we want our products and our brand to evolve.
Lisbon was the first major offline event where we presented the refreshed Onlyplay in full, while also introducing Hyper Play to the industry. Our focus now is on continuing that work: developing the core portfolio, launching new products, preparing the first Hyper Play game for Q4 2026 and continuing to invest in the product directions where we see the strongest long-term potential.
Onlyplay was originally launched in 2020, with June marking the supplier's sixth company anniversary
