“You Should Always Focus on What You Do Best.”
The team of ATMOSFERA shares its take on getting started in the live casino industry.
If you are as much a fan of live casino games as we are, you must have already spotted a rising start of the industry — ATMOSFERA. The studio debuted with its portfolio of truly unique games, including releases like Battleship and European Bingo Roulette — something that you won’t see in portfolios of its competitors.
In addition to original releases, it is hard not to get swept away by the professional presenters, custom-built studio, and its minimalistic design, and lots of features for convenient gambling from portable devices. Naturally, we were curious to meet the team behind the promising brand and to chat about their unique vision, the risks they were willing to take when searching for the label’s unique voice, and the challenges that the year 2020 brought to all the new companies.
Answering our questions and sharing the experience is the company’s CEO, Yury Ermantraut. So, without any further ado, here’s what we talked about.
KeyToCasinos would love to meet the key members behind ATMOSFERA and to learn more about the inspiration and experience that drives the team to create live dealer games.
I have no doubt that now in our ATMOSFERA team everyone is a key member. Each of us is fully involved in organizing the internal atmosphere of the company and in obtaining product feedback. I believe we complement each other.
Yury Ermantraut, the CEO of ATMOSFERA
How did the company find its unique voice when it came to putting together the portfolio? Why was this alternative voice needed, in your opinion?
In my experience, you should always focus on what you do best. Initially, our team was formed with the expertise of creating bet on numbers products. At first, we received a request from a big client to form a product line of this type. After we collected the profit data from the live casino market, we decided to develop further in this field. We are aware of a big competition in this sphere, and it makes us even more engaged in the process.
We are aware of a big competition in this sphere, and it makes us even more engaged in the process.
On ATMOSFERA’s website, there is mention of the company investing in research that explores the player experience and in finding ways to change it. This is an initiative that many new businesses consider risky. Would you say the risk paid off?
Yes, it really was a risky path. We made a lot of mistakes, moving along it, as a plus, got invaluable experience. As a minus, we spent time and resources. Now we are moving according to the classic format of creating a live casino product line and product types. Experiments will definitely become a part of our development, but for this, we need to create and strengthen a certain business foundation. This is what we are focusing on now.
Experiments will definitely become a part of our development...
Speaking of the industry of live casino games and table games, it looks like it is going through immense growth and diversification. Why do you believe this is the current tendency?
The live gambling industry does experience an annual increase in profitability. This is evidenced by both the public reports of companies — market participants and analytical consulting agencies, and the numbers are ahead of forecasts. Somewhere growth is due to the legalization of the market, and somewhere, of course, an increase in demand for it. And by the way, this is one of the reasons why we are doing this business.
Most of ATMOSFERA’s heavy lifting stage – launch, marketing, partnerships with new casinos – was done during a very challenging time of lockdowns. How did you pivot around what many companies found to be a challenge and turn the situation to your advantage? And how did the staff power through working remotely?
I think we have successfully visited the ICE exhibition in London in February. As a result of networking, a certain number of agreements were signed, the integration of which we have been carrying out over the entire 2020 year. I really love the gambling market for this, most of all for its openness to network. Remote work was a new challenge for the whole team, and we successfully coped with it. Constraints often teach you new skills that are useful for overcoming challenges in the future.
Remote work was a new challenge for the whole team, and we successfully coped with it.
What are your key markets and what has been the feedback from players from these markets regarding the company’s releases so far? Which games turned out to be the most successful?
The most popular ATMOSFERA products are Live Roulette, Bet on Poker and European Bingo Roulette. Soon we will release a very important update for Live Roulette which will partially solve the problems of changing the user experience, about which I mentioned above.
Which of the releases are your personal favorites in the portfolio of ATMOSFERA, and why?
We are proud of our latest Bet on Poker release. If you haven't had time to check it out yourself, be sure to appreciate the quality of the studio and visual solutions. With all this, we still have a lot of room to grow. Identifying and understanding a problem is a powerful growth point for us.
This is the perfect time and place to tease us about the upcoming releases. What should we expect from the creative team of ATMOSFERA in the nearest future?
Since you have already seen our site atmosfera.is, you may have already noticed the published teaser about one product. We already mentioned - this is the Music Wheel (a product from the Game Shows series). This is a very simple and fun game that will integrate cool personalized music.
We are looking forward to the moment to finish the work and make the release. Stay tuned to see this first.
