How was the process to transform Roxor Gaming into Anaxi, and which are your first impressions after this first year of the new company’s activities?
JM: Roxor was a privately held business, and we’ve moved through the acquisition into being a foundational part of the iGaming brand of Aristocrat. In technological terms, Roxor has a lot of games and a range of promotional tools. Essentially, we’ve integrated that into Anaxi as a foundational part of the business. It’s a new business, launched just a year ago today. We have also integrated the teams. There have been lots of energy and enthusiasm. There’s been a real desire to get into a B2B environment.
What were the challenges that working for Aristocrat posed for your team and how were you able to solve them?
JM: Honestly, it’s been fun. I mean, we are like at a startup mode in a way, since it’s a new division for Aristocrat. We were able to complement the ideas of the land-based gaming people with our own creativity. Bringing our teams and our technology together has been great. Aristocrat already had a very capable group, so that made the integration easier. We know that building a new culture is always challenging.
I always had this doubt: the largest audience for online and social gaming is young people up to 45 years old, but companies also seek to involve older generations, regular slot players in land-based casinos. How to develop attractive RMG content for these different demographics?
JM: It’s a great opportunity, right? It’s just about understanding your market. Roxor was very much part of a B2C business, looking to define ways to engage and entertain players. What motivates them? What are the games they like? So now we are bringing all of that into a new world in Anaxi. For the other part, Aristocrat has a huge amount of knowledge, being the biggest and the best brand out there. Putting these two worlds together has actually been quite stimulating. We focus very heavily on creating reasons for players to want to come back and engage with the games again, now in the online world, and we have gamified the rewards experience. Thanks to Aristocrat, we were able to know more about those traditional players, understand their interests and behaviors, the data already collected about them, to develop personalized products.
Can you please describe some of the Customer Experience Solutions (CXS) Anaxi presented at G2E Las Vegas event?
KR: Our focus on Customer Experience Solutions (CXS) has been on three major areas. One is evolution, where we are actually improving the core foundation of our product and making it better, more tech forward. The second is mobilization, where we are building player and operator experiences to basically drive more player engagement and more operator efficiency. On the mobilization side, we have a bunch of products that we have showcased in Vegas. There are three in particular that I want to talk about. The first one is our new Player Max product, which is an engagement focused app. It includes features like showing jackpots that are on the floor, and bringing them on the app, making customers aware of them. We also have our new and improved Wallet Experience. Basically, it streamlines the experience of how you connect from your phone to the machine, how you move money back and forth, and how you manage your balances. The third solution is more of a prototype that we have put out there. It is focused on creating social elements during the game to expand players’ excitement. They can see where they are in the leaderboard and create a social experience. So our goal is to first start with game level events, but we can also see how this actually can be merged with our Player Max app where you have player level events.
What’s the roadmap you are setting for the future to increase players’ loyalty, and help the company expand its revenue in the digital segment?
JM: The roadmap is it’s pretty exciting. We have these amazing titles loved by players on the casino floors. Now, we have the opportunity to bring those into iGaming. For the next 12 months, we will be focusing on bringing key brands to the market, like the Buffalo games. I can mention some of the casino floor favorites, like Cash Express, or Luxury Line, which will be our first progressive jackpot game. Then we’ve got Jackpot Carnival. There’s a lot of content coming. Some games are adapted from land-based gaming and others directly go to iGaming. So we will be pretty busy in the future, with great products to be released soon.