Magnus Olsson, Head of Sales and Account Management, Play’n GO.

As a business you always want to move forward, to grow and continue to forge a new path in your sector. However, this growth won’t spring from thin air; it has to come from somewhere. Quite simply you have to look at where you’ve come from to inform you where you are going.

2018 was a great year for us at Play’n GO, we released a number of successful games; created some important partnerships and grew our company to over 350 employees worldwide. However, the biggest mistake would be to sit back and be complacent; you have to look forward.

However, that doesn’t mean that you forget about what you have achieved or ignore it. On the contrary, you must constantly look back at what you have done to reach new heights and take lessons from it. This doesn’t only mean looking at your successes; you must also take note of what didn’t work or didn’t work as well as you would have liked and let it inform what you do next. They say those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it and, unfortunately, this only usually applies to the failures and not the triumphs.

You can never succeed by doing the exact same thing you did before. Last year we had great success with our games Rise of Olympus and Sweet Alchemy, with Sweet Alchemy being particularly innovative in the market. For us to just repeat those games this year would not yield the same results, quite the opposite in fact; it would be seen as a sign of laziness, unoriginality and complacency harming the company’s reputation and its bottom line.

However, what we can do is take lessons from our releases. What did players and operators like? What performed well and why? What features were the most enjoyable? Last year we raised the number of games that we released, and the industry responded positively and let us know there was a market for more of our games, so this year we will be releasing 40 games, each one carefully crafted from the first pitch to the final product and informed by the successes of what we have done before.

In the same way, we will continue to grow and expand ourselves as a business but only with careful consideration and planning based on experience. For instance, we have found that a strong showing in terms of compliance and regulation makes for a stronger foundation which is why we are licenced in many areas and compliant in even more. With the landmark change in the regulation of Sweden, we realised that entering a new market and being fully compliant would help us to grow and reach a wider audience with our entertainment. So we made sure that we were fully compliant and ready to go as soon as the regulation kicked in and have already forged several partnerships with some of the biggest companies in Sweden such as Svenska Spel and ATG, putting us in a strong position to succeed in the region.

With success comes growth, which leads to the need to expand your workforce. We are now larger than ever and still growing meaning we need more people to make sure we are offering the same great level of products and service that we have become known for. We now stand at over 350 people in the Play’n GO family, and each one contributes to our achievements, through their hard work and understanding of our values, our mission and our goals. We will continue to grow this year, but we know exactly the type of hardworking, fun-loving and amiable people that we are looking for and will fit in with the folks we have now.

2019 is looking to be a great year for us, one of our biggest yet and we intend to make the most of it. We will continue to create entertaining and innovative content for the industry, while also providing our other services such as our Casino Platform and OMNY, our Server-Based Gaming solution to ensure that our clients can provide their players with the best, most complete gaming experiences possible. But, all the while, we will continue to look back and take lessons from what we have done, while continuing to learn the lessons that this year brings in preparation for the future.