One Year On

It has now been a year since we closed the doors at Green Jade Games HQ for the last time, but in some ways, it feels like a lifetime ago. As founders and small business owners will know, running a start-up is an all consuming exhaustive affair that creates highs impossible to replicate, and sustains lows that are hard to trudge through. Time, as a construct, was altered immeasurably during the Covid-19 pandemic. Where once my year was punctuated with tradeshows and holidays, we instead had extended periods of isolation, not just from people, but from routines, making it hard for me to remember exactly when one event happened and in what certain order. But I remember everything that our colleagues did together. All the bold ideas that we ideated to production. All the changes in role and responsibility as careers developed and all the Friday afternoon glasses of wine over Fifa and Street Fighter.

Having had the time to reflect, I thought I would share some of my learnings and touch on what I would have done differently with the power of hindsight.

But first, I want to give credit to our industry. I've spoken before about my passion for the space, for my pride in how we're evolving, how we don't hide from the tough ethical debates and how we band together to support those in need. I experienced this first-hand in early 2023 as my peers reached out to offer their open roles at their companies to my colleagues, having announced redundancies for all staff. At our highest headcount, we touched fifty names, with thirty five of us being in Malta. I believe that near everyone managed to find new roles in the country, with just a few moving over seas, not least in part because of the industry reaching out to us in our most desperate time of need.

"Don't forget to make money". Nick Maughan and Nik Robinson both gave me this sage advice at the very beginning. Serial entrepreneurs worth listening to, you might think. But me? Maybe I thought I was special, that our ideas were so incredible that we could work only on the 'fun stuff'. It wasn't that. It was that I didn't understand the simplest advice. I know now that getting the same product out that others have made builds the muscles you need to do the different stuff that excites me. I was scared that if we made slots, and they were successful, it would be impossible to build a suite of Arcade games and iterate until success. Maybe that is true, but what we would have done at the very least is build shareholder value. Don't get me wrong. I don't think there has been a harder time in our industry to be a start-up slots manufacturer, so there was no guarantee of success, but we never had our bread and butter games. I'm likely misremembering how Breon Corcoran said it at his first 'townhall' in Betfair Malta, but I've simplified it as "You have to earn the right". With added context, I believe he meant that you must master your first domain before you try and win in a competitive space. We forgot to master RNG game play. We went straight to the main event.

During my time at Wizard Games, and now more recently Entain Studios, I am constantly humbled by the huge number of people who not only remember Green Jade Games but speak about the company fondly, not with reverence, but with love and the wishes that it could have been different. It has to be the videos Jesper K?rrbrink made to promote our games because we didn't have any runaway successes!

Jesper and I used to debate about the word "Innovation", in fact, I remember attending a talk he gave at a NetEnt event where he spoke about innovation, a talk in which he gave his opinion on whether NetEnt were still innovating, or not. There is a media prestige given to those that innovate, those that provide value in a way not done before, or combine ideas and products to achieve something someone wanted without them even knowing. It was Henry Ford that said “If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. In our space, no one was asking for their hyper-casual mobile game to be turned into a gambling game but then, no one was asking to bet with others on when they think a multiplier might have been reached, either. During our time at Green Jade Games, we built a managed Lobby, integrated it into dozens of casinos, streamed live through the Lobby with Alex and Emma, playing our games from our green-room to the world. We built slots with Skill Balance Pots compensating some player's losses to boost other's winnings. We built a quiz game with real skill affecting prizes, a bubble-burst game that would have been the one to make it if we'd just had a bit more time. We developed our own platform. We made leader boards and in-game notifications. We did a lot. But the one thing we didn't do? We didn't make money.

Every day, when I cross the threshold into my family home, I see Green Jade Games written on the door mat. It was a huge part of my identity, and for all the knowledge I have now, I don't think I could go back and change a thing. Green Jade Games will spawn a dozen new game ideas and businesses, of that I am sure. The talent around me inspired me everyday and I from what I can see, is out there incubating new ideas and adding value left, right and centre. It was a period of work on more than fifty peoples journeys and my pride in having been a part of that compensates for what could have been.

One year on, my advice is - go out, dream big, and innovate, but also 'don't forget to make money'.