6 x Operative Changes That Kept SciPlay Growing with Josh Wilson, CEO of SciPlay

hey folks and welcome to the deconstruct of fun podcast I'm your host Mich katoff and in this episode we have our returning guest Mr Josh Wilson who is the CEO of c playay and cplay is a casino Sil Casino company uh and I think this this episode is particularly interesting because despite the Privacy changes the economic headwinds C play has been growing for a past six seven consecutive quarters and the company has gone through a real transer since the uh the market has changed they've cut ad spend they invested into adtech they invested into segmentation tools they invest into their own platform they invested into the talent that they have and really reinforced the mission of being focused on customer relationship management so I think this podcast is interesting for everybody not just those who are working in the social casinos space because you can learn a lot on how Social Casino operates and it's also interesting because Josh is um

straight shooter he tells it how it is and he's a great person to interview and um hopefully he comes back again on the podcast but anyways hope you enjoy this podcast I'm sure you're going to learn a ton I personally did and want to remind you there's a a simple gaming Summit Link in the description below so we're doing uh once again our annual big event with Google about thousand people coming in on 7th of March and then on 8th of March we have a little bit of a smaller more focused investor Summit so sign up there's pre registration is open the uh the uh the main page will be open soon um probably as you are listening to this and hope to see you there hope you enjoyed the podcast and as always if you enjoyed it' be great to get all five stars and um yeah let us know how you felt without further Ado Josh [Music] Wilson hey Josh and welcome back to the podcast

thank you so much I'm extremely happy to be here like we we met about it you know a year ago and it was just such a fantastic conversation so very much looking forward to like having another good conversation yes uh so talking about last year so we uh last year we spoke and we discussed the role of a CEO in building a culture and how to successfully continue scaling an organization with hundreds hundreds of employees worldwide we also talked about what are the sort of a best and the worst things about being a CEO of a public traded company and even though it's been only a year or so apart a lot has changed so first of all we got the ATT all the Privacy changes like we know that we knew that they were coming but they're they're now in full effect and we can see the impact on the mobile market as a result of this and some other macroeconomic factors the the the mobile market has declined the interest rates are not zero anymore they're actually pretty far away from a zero so we see a lot of valuations going down a

lot of m&a frenzy in the 21 22s has stopped and then CPL your own company acquired a Turkish hyper casual developer elus since last time we spoke for 100 million in cash payments 80% for 100 million you acquired an Israel casual Casino developer come to play for an undisclosed amount and on top of these two Acquisitions the S playay itself was acquired by light and wonder so a lot A lot has happened in the uh in the last year or so so can you please talk about what has been like in the Helm of cplay uh going through the Privacy changes going through the macroeconomic headwinds through these Acquisitions and bringing people along so uh yeah how has it been for the last couple of years well where it's been extremely busy with a lot of change it's been really really good um we've had a lot of excitement to your to your point bringing in uh elus um for multiple reasons was the

right move uh at the right time you know we were continuing to look at finding new revenue streams a lot of people will say like oh you got to get into casual you gotta I look at it as new revenue streams whether not that is a new game in a casino category or a casual category it's really new Revenue into the business uh the reason we are very very happy about this and we see this being part of our future is not only are the game side but they brought in an admon side of the business that is still growing very very much in the uh games market today but we had no what I call is right to play there because we didn't build any technology that did they had so overnight they brought us two years into the future which set up the groundworks for us to be able to create a new Revenue stream

which I'll talk to here in a in a few minutes at the same time you know I think the last time we talked we talked a little bit about how we were going to invest into the core of our business in order to set up all of our current game so our Jackpot Party quick hit goldfish 88 into a growth mode um and all of those Investments were well I just say panned out great like you see you see our growth um and it wasn't any one thing that we did it was four major things that we've done in order to get us there and it's like you know as as generic as it'll sound it was in adtech uh we made large investments in our data platform in order to be able to make real-time decisions quicker um we also made some infrastructure changes that would allow us to take learnings from game to game quicker uh and make in-game decisions

faster and then last but not least creating our own you know direct a consumer platform so be able to establish a closer relationship with our customers because we control the entire platform instead of being on someone else's platform um and the mixture of all these combined has allowed us to continue to grow really really well now you bring you know come to play uh which is now basically just part of our um you know part of our Israel studio uh uh the elus uh team that we have in Turkey all of this together we're able to start building out admon games at the same time and we're able to not just look at casual games we're able to look at Social Casino Games we're able to look at hyper casual games and then the come toplay team actually has a really good background in Solita so we're also able

to look at that genre and bring it in um the one thing what I would say is we are focused on games that the simple core Loop has very similar game characteristics to slot machine and bingo um and what I mean by that is it's people that will play that simple core Loop over and over and over again and you don't really progress in the simp Le core loop it's all the meta that's around it that the progression exists and this allows us to feel like we have a the right to play in both Solitaire and other you know what I call Simple casual games um and this is where the focus is all of it together really is kind of telling the future of what s playay is um but we couldn't do it without the Investments that we made to make sure that the core business business continues to grow um and this

is where you know all the investment dollars are made for us all right a lot to unpack here so let me let me try to to come it from certain points I'll use huge games and and plka as a certain number of reference because they are also public companies and they also share a lot of uh information of what they're doing so in terms of um the Investments you've made so the the let's say the direct to uh direct to Consumer platform those are probably Investments uh probably are those the Investments that allow you to uh monetize players outside the app stores like we've seen I think still front in the earning call just a month this week or last week they were making I think 30% from uh off app stores I think huge was posting similar type of a number is this that type of an investment yeah it it's it's that type of investment I except for I think that's a perk of doing it the reason we wanted to do it is we

want to eventually be able to own the platform as many customers as we can be and have uh have like right now we're very dependent on Apple Android uh Facebook Facebook less now than what it used to be but they own everything that our customers play on so when they decide Apple says AT&T this is now a change and Google says hey you now can't do this like eventually we have to figure out a way that customers can play in our world and this platform gives us the ability to do this over time so what I'm kind of hoping is long term we're going to end up with a phone world or a platform world where you actually create your platform install it on that world and this is how you communicate with the customer itself um now huge benefit of this is

Apple Google they all charge 30% we're now our own credit card per processor so we get you know let's call it less than 10% so there is massive eitaa savings um which then gives us more money to invest back into Roi growth but it's still like it was always about the customer first it was never about he hey we just want to go make more we always made more money because we always wanted to be more efficient this just a way to accelerate it um which is the also the reason our migration will most likely be slower than other companies because we're asking customers to do something different than they've always done I don't want to lose one customer in asking them to do that because keeping them as a customer is more important to me than saving 20 per 20 cents on the dollar and so it's just I I would say it's like

similar but different motivations if that makes sense I understand so drisking basically the uh the the growth uh or not not the growth just drisking because of you're not at the full mercy of the platforms and at the same time uh owning your customer relationship rather than having the platform own them for you so that's uh that's naturally especially with the the type of casino games that tend to have a very long like very strong retention numbers for the core users as you know I've you know I've worked at Zinga I know how Casino Works uh from the side looking it's a it's a high retention business yeah I mean the growth of the business comes from maintaining old cohorts not as much marketing yes marketing is future cohorts added on but if you're bleeding everywhere else it's just filling holes so you know definitely Social Casino is all about player retention yes I remember payback times like even starting at 3 years so

that kind of gives you the uh the picture of uh of the user acquisition landscape for for these games um and then you mentioned the infrastructure so did I understand correctly that the investments in infrastructure were there to enable launching more games faster no I would say what it was able to do is put all of our games in their portfolio and a place where they could communicate with each other quicker so like a lot of companies will say hey we're going to build one solo engine and everyone's going to play off that engine um it's a way to go and like I we've seen successful companies do it and it works I'd never like the approach because when you do that you lose creativity by studio and that creativity by studio is how Innovation happens to me and so I like to keep that stuff separate but there are a lot of things that can happen that don't need to be separate so data platform uh

decision-making platforms um different algorithm uh learning um feature success so some features can be built in a way that you know will go across the entire portfolio and Social Casino for example jackpots are something that don't need to have five different versions of it because it's a s feature that works and so what we did is we really evaluated the things that we have very very high confidence would work across all games and made this more standardized and so that was the investment that we made was and that did two things one it gets more High performing features into games quicker but it also does it for a cheaper amount of development cost yeah this is really smart because I've worked at large companies as well well and often times one team even in the same

building would have done a great feature that then the head of division or somebody else would say hey talk to Sarah her team has done this and then you start talking and that kind of feature doesn't really come in the same way in your game because you end up making some small changes and like the the end result is not there so what you have done is you standardize those base features will you just take it off the shelf and put it in your game as well yeah and that's the best way to think about it you know obviously it's skinned and it's made to the motivation of the game it's going into um but I mean it is a problem if anyone you know that to your point anyone that's been in video games for a really really long time the one thing that you just hit your head on is like the amount of people that go copy a feature and then innately change the one or two things that that feature work and then wonder why it doesn't work and you're like

do do you yeah do you not why it worked and what it was meant to do and like but it happens over and over and over again and like just being able to hedge against that don't do it all the time and you don't want to copy everything over because then you just end up with like clones of games and the thing is our customers are different in each game they're we do have some overlap but it's not that much and the paying customer is definitely not that much so you there's a reason they go to each one of the titles and part of it is the Aesthetics and how it looks part of it is the meta but a lot of it is the content is just a little bit different and this is why you know when a when a a casino goer goes into a a casino they have a wide range of everything well they don't play a wide range of everything they go to the things that they enjoy the most well we tried to build as much as we could sections of that uh Casino so we would be able to

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works and of course the core experience is different but you don't have to you know learn the uh the other side of it the metas and the so forth yeah I dead right like this is uh this is exactly the theory that we use and how we try to put it together um ultimately you know I I think we talked about this the last time we were together um ultimately your goal is the you know the the director am of ation or director product is when that customer picks up their phone you want them to launch your game and the only way to do that is create the most entertaining experience that you possibly can so spending Cycles doing the thing that has to be standardized everywhere doesn't make sense for sure you your your your vision's got to be like hey if I gave them this feature can I get an extra three four minutes a day uh if I gave them this feature can I get one more

play session uh a week and that's really where we want their mindsets really focused is like getting that next minute of time over what do you need to get the base amount of time makes makes all the sense I mean uh just you know being on the ground I I know how uh how difficult these kind of simple things tend to be so it's good to hear that uh that you've made the Investments and now they're uh being used across the whole portfolio so and then uh kind of going to the uh the last pieces so what made a lot of sense is of course focusing on the slot and bingo Loops so even though you've acquired casual gaming company or hyper casual whatever you want to uh name it or or characterize it they still focus on certain Casino features uh that are then just uh have different monetization model you mentioned ad monetization being kind of like the next Forte the one that you're moving in and and that one is uh holding up even in the sort of recessionary SL uh at environment um and

so my question kind of like leading up to this is plka has been famous in the sense saying that they are not doing new games like they've they've basically said we don't even know how to do new games I don't I'm not I'm not quoting directly but indirectly they said they don't know how to do it they just acquire games and then help them demonetize are you doing new games like is the uh is the uh the acquisition of of elus uh that part of they're doing new games but are other Studios doing new games as well yeah so what I would say and it's like pla is one of the greatest mobile video game companies that were ever built so let's give them props for everything they've done um but I mean Robert would say they built their major portfolio through acquisition right like I think their two major games that were built internally were Slotomania and uh Caesar pretty sure almost everything else was acquired brought in and then they ran it and they ran it well um we're the exact

opposite only one game of my portfolio was purchased and that was Bingo Showdown everything else was organically built uh in teams throughout the country or worlds I guess throughout the world um and so this is kind of who our DNA has been is building brand new games and then launching them now I think the key for us is only build games and genres that we have the right to play in so am I going to go try to build the next raid probably not like am I gonna try to go build the next Sims no um these are places that if I as a company or we as a company wanted to get in it would have to be through acquisition of a company has already done it they're successful we believe in their growth so on so on um a place that I think we do have the

right is in places that have simple core Loops so like Solitaire U as long as we acquire a company that had the expertise of Solitaire we believe that everything we've done with meta monetization from our casino games can be put on top of that simple core Loop um and so things that are really easily moving like that so you could say you know solitaire matchim type games snake iio whole iio like games that are really repeti you do the same thing it progresses you the meta around you is what keeps you engaged um now other part is I will always tell you my next major growth is going to become my core current games continue to grow this is the focus of the company this is where the growth is coming this is why we've been able to outperform the market

the last six or seven quarters whatever it is um because 85% of our focus is making sure our Core Business grows it's not chasing the next new game it's not chasing the next Revenue stream this is where we make sure that we've done the Investments needed the other 10 to 15% is looking for that new Revenue stream now the reason why admon much shorter development Cycles so it's not taking 18 months to two years to build a game it's taking six months so if I'm wrong I don't I didn't just spend five to eight million to cost of acquisition moves with ecpm so when marketing cost goes up ecpm go up when marketing cost comes down ecpm go down so unlike you know IAA games where when

cost of acquisition goes up you have to figure out how to create more LTV which is much much harder here the monetization fits how the acquisition goes so we just have to build a really good game so it almost takes that part out of it and this is the reason why we believe like it's the next way to add some now are we going to be able to build a admon department as big as our core no like no one has and it you know can you build a couple hundred million dollar business in admon yes there's a lot of people that have done it and that business doesn't have a platform fee at all so you're paying a two to three% to whatever the uh mediator is or whatever or to you know if it's brands or however you're doing it um but there is no

credit card fee because there is no credit cards that's uh that's that that makes all the sense and and a very very calculated approach and have you seen success already from elus that that are is according to the expectation or is still kind of getting there I think it's getting there the thing that we saw from elus is over the last year we tried a few different things which make us more confident that the plan can work and it also made us realiz that we're going to have a couple studios in our uh in our portfolio working on it it also made us realize that Solitaire could be a very good output to this and we also need to evaluate uh Social Casino and Social Casino could be an outlet for this so I don't believe in putting admon in our current IAP games I think that's a mistake um mainly because we're all always converting people that have been playing the game for years

into Pairs and once I think you go admon you stop that conversion over time but there could be a way to create a game that is still majorly a social casino but the meta Works different to have the monetization through admon which theoretically would allow us to bring in customers cheaper uh because I'm not whale hunting anymore I'm now looking for people that are just going to come in and play and be engaged but we'll watch videos therefore instead of looking at this group of first-party data I get to expand my slot data or reach of people um and then when they come in I'm also able to get a sense of which of them potentially could be cross promoe to the rest of the portfolio so it starts to

become a a strategic plan in order to take the company forward for the next two to three years got it so the acquisition is uh there's kind of two thesises of the acquisition one is the audience play as you you know explained so much larger audiences with these very casual games that uh that a casino game could get and there's a chance of cross cross promotion uh or cheaper acquisition and then the uh the second part is um getting access to certain competences with at monetization uh certain capabilities as well as entry to the new genre and when it comes to entering the new genre like like you said you you focus on still that slots that Bingo that solitire uh it's uh it's definitely you know looking at the broader Market smart because I it's hard to name I think I can name only two companies that are successful in Casino as well as in other genres those would be scopely through the acquisition of GSN so again it's not like they they I mean they acquired a

very successful Casino you know developer publisher and Zinga probably the uh the longest uh longest raining uh top player in the casino while also having all the uh all the other genres but also they have acquired a lot of their uh Casino competences correct and I think that's the the key to it is most people acquired their way there um but they've struggled to keep their non Focus growing like their focus will you know the thing that they were already good at will continue to move they've struggled like adapting over and so I spent my entire like my cycles of thinking is like Hey how do I make sure this is an investment that it's an investment that's Roi positive it's not just Topline Revenue it's profitable Topline revenue and this is where I feel very confident about our strategy because our strategy isn't just be successful here

or not it's be successful also helping us grow our core at the same time by giving it a shot and so it's kind of just a a portfolio Play More Than Just a genre play yeah understandable and it's also sets a certain certain strategy for your m&a team that they're just not looking at everything or everything that is profitable but uh but something that actually boosts your portfolio and and especially the existing ones so um I'm gonna continue by quoting your Q2 investor call uh or not or earnings call uh not investor call earnings call because uh um you know that's the last one that you did as an as an independent uh company and quoting you you said for the sixth consecutive quarter C has outperformed the entire social Casino Market Revenue grew to 190 million up from 160 million in Q2 last year this is a strong 19% year over-year growth it demonstrates the resilience of our games

and the consistent engagement of our player base we deliver great gaming and entertainment experience to our customers thanks to our terrific s team H and the call you also presented the uh the 45% year-over year growth compared to the last year's second quarter so my question is like this is a quote from this year like few months ago not from 2021 not from 2020 when everybody was growing um How was play growing when the rest of the market declined you know it's a it's like that magical question that I think all of us even try to figure out um and I don't know that there's a particular reason why um the way I kind of think of it is it's probably four to six different things that we do really really well and it's not like hey we do this well hey we're not a monetization company and this is all we do we're not a marketing company

and this is all we do um what I would say is we're a very diverse abilities to do things and so we made some strong Investments at the beginning of uh I would say third quarter of 2021 and if you remember you know the AT&T stuff came or idfa but that that launched in April of uh 21 and nothing really happened everyone was like hey everything still works we're good um September of 21 the new iPhone comes out and all of a sudden a company like us which were very very Roi focused most of our marketing money became Roi negative like we we were like we're not going to be profitable anymore

what the heck and I remember sitting down with the executive team and all coming together we like had an emergency meeting didn't jump on a video call we all flew to a location we sat down and we were like if we don't pivot we're not going to be here in two years and as a group we were like okay first cut your spent like we're still gonna hold to our things we're only going to spend money that is Roi positive we went from spending like two and a half million to three million on our largest games to 500k like and if we spent 51 that one was unprofitable so we just had to um but the good news is in the short term we had a lot of iida that was sitting there well we use that iida to make some big Investments uh we made multi-million

dollar investments into our adte business we made multi-million dollar investments into uh basically our technical infrastructure allowing us to like share data easily across all of our games to make decisions easily across all of our games uh in order to share feuture success across a games a lot of decisions that basically did hey we want to be able to take the the knoow from game to game but at the same point we want each game to be unique and on its own and have its own road map and and big decision at that point um we also made a lot of investments in our what I would call real-time decision making or our monetization so being able to customize the game even further by

individuals um we then also created what we call the direct to Consumer which would be the kickoff of our own platform so why is this important well we're in this situation because a platform decided it wanted to change its rules so in our side we wanted to say hey how how can we get to a point where someday it's our customer and our world and our platform and so this was a kickoff to this now there's also the benefit of we now the credit card process are also so instead of paying 30% we're paying under 10% which is just means every dollar is more profitable which we can use for investment and growth later um and then the last one which I think is probably the key to all of it is we made huge investments in Talent um not not that we went and just said hey let's go take people from the

best companies in the world that's not actually what we did at all what we said is we have pockets of talent throughout our business that we believe the best of the best of all games are here how do we figure out programs that can take this and permeate it across the entire plat the entire company and so our investment was like use our best people and teaching them how to be teachers and then and then that went from like teaching them how to hire teaching them how to interview teaching them how to be better managers grow and it was it was a long-term investment because like there's a reason college is four years because it takes a long time but we just saw quarter over quarter our Talent based get better and better and better and better and our our goal is

like Hey we're not like not to go copy this company not to go to be S playay um and so now where do I sit today we don't have our our marketing constraints aren't because of I ATT our marketing constraints are because we fiscally run a company correctly uh so we do a percentage of our Revenue back in marketing this is how you should run a company um we focus on retaining our player so I don't think of Revenue growth of how many people I can go buy we think of Revenue growth of how many people can we retain what growth can we get from them well that's the stable core of the business now marketing is just additive cohorts on top and every one in our in our portfolio or our company this is their

mindset and then the last but not least and I hope what I'm going to say is true but I really believe it is if you ask any of the 800 plus employees what the mission of sciplay is it's to be a player first focused company it's not to be a get the most amount of money it's not to you know increase LTV it's to be a player first Focus company which means we're more of a CRM company than we are a mobile video game company Mobile video games are just what we do to retain the customer and I think it's like a mixture of all of this like if we did just one of those best in Market but did the rest of them not we I think we'd be where the market is today and so when you got to these like I'm just going to write what I spent like you cut the spend so that gave you the iida you invested in the

adtech and infrastructure we kind of talked about that uh previously um you invest into segmentation tools if I will like personalization of the uh of the experience uh you invested into your own platform because of uh hostile actions of the platform holders let's put it that way in a business sense um Talent Investments so teach to be a teacher and um reinforc the mission of uh of being customer focused so CR and um that's a that's a very interesting um very interesting way of putting up I wanted to talk to you about heroic Labs building a successful game is hard enough without worrying about building your own game Tech as well heroic Labs provides a comprehensive gam stack to help you get your game into Market faster and scale beyond the competition with their uni game framework hero you can cut development and prototyping time in half and quickly add social economy and reward system to grow your game Satori the liveops platform built specifically for the games industry lets you run Live Events AB tests deliver Dynamic content to

players and always keep your game growing nakama the industry's leading open source game server lets you develop locally providing all social and competitive features for your game and then seamlessly transition to their heroic Cloud hosted service and easily scale to meet the largest of audience demands find out how to get started at heroic labs.com I've been at at you know advising companies uh and CEO of some companies whenever they uh they have a revenue hit they actually turn to marketing to fix that Revenue head in free-to-play business it's like well we can still do marketing let's bring more people let's monetize them early on let's you know um control the leak while we figure out then the product and you went the uh not not when you have been always the other way around like we focus always on the product and marketing is only growing the uh the user base of that successful product correct I remember and uh I

might have been in 21 I can't remember the exact date it was that postco I know that for sure and I was having a conversation with um one of our very talented directors uh in the UA and I asked the question is like how much does it cost to get a pair he's like cost us $100 to get a pair in two days I had a company like Fireside and I'm like every payer you lose is $100 it's not the payer you bring in it's the payer you lose that costs money and it just you know sometimes when you get that one piece of data that changes how you look at it because most people don't think hey I lost a player I can go get five more no you lost someone that's going to cost you $100 to replace yeah over time and

plus and you can replace either by trying to get one or making the existing ones monetized twice as they were before so that's also not an easy task like increase the monetization by two times like that's that's impossible it is like and and by the way if you do it you're most likely going to turn out that yes yeah so you know it's shorttime Revenue for a long-term hit yeah yeah or you just switch the uh the purchase Behavior they might monetize now and not monetize for a long time afterwards because uh whatever sales you were running it's like almost one of the most weirdly thing that happens almost everywhere all the time we call it the upsell effect it's like almost every new person that comes into this world believes oh like hey you bought $5 I'll give you a better multiplier to buy 10 oh you bought 10 I'll I'll give you a better multiplier by 15 and this works is where everyone has an unlimited

amount of money customers don't most majority of customers have like a wallet size of 510 bucks a week so in this Theory by the third week you've already out you've outsized their wallet yeah so they have two choices either get worse multipliers or quit and go somewhere else they tend to quit and go somewhere else yeah that's an important point because if I my data is correct they play also other casino games because those machines might be hot when yours is not so they have always the chance to play more of the competitor games or pick your competitors game first rather than yours uh in their day uh so it's uh there's there's also that the switching cost is not that high because they have actually invested in multiple games at the same time at 100% right I I don't remember well I do remember it came from Facebook but I haven't heard newer data so I

don't know that it's still true today but they said the average social Casino Player plays five to six games per week but they only pay him one and a half so majority of what they do is only so do they keep playing years but switch to paying in another one that just means the LTV stop yeah you may continue to keep the DA but the the revenue is cut off and getting them back is most likely not something you can do it's most likely because this customer loses them again and then they come back but yeah it's a it's a unique world and I think it's we'll continue to evolve as an industry um I hope we're always a step or two ahead and I think so far we have been um but it's just means you can never sit still yeah you always to be like not focused on what's

happening today and understanding that today is just you know the next two years chess move you're just your first moves today and that's it yeah that's why that's the reason the the realities of Social Casino is why uh Social Casino people are considered to be the best operating talent in the industry because the the products are essentially the same it's who can operate their product the best and usually players actually use multiple products at the same time so it's like it's the competition at its purest it's data uh user acquisition um all of that product experience you know user experience Q&A all of that at the purest and whoever is the best at operating tends to do the best yeah that's very very well said and I I agree 100% well let's move to the uh your the CPL acquisition not by light and wonder can you talk a little bit about light and wonder it's a gambling company with nearly 7 billion of annual

revenue oh sorry it's the valuation is probably 7 billion and the annual revenues are about three billion yeah I think that's I think that's that's more correct I was gonna say I may not always be correct on that one so pretty sure this second one was right um yeah it's exciting times exciting times and what I would say is uh first foremost just say they they're way light and wonder is a games company um their platform is real money gaming but they're a games company they're in here they're making you know for people that don't get the chance to ever go play a slot machine or whatnot they tell a story uh it is an entertainment the only difference is you pay for every spin of that entertainment which is a different form but it is what it is now uh some people take it full out gambling and they like it's an excitement dopamine but we also know that video games release the same

dopamine in fact they just do it less often um but the major focus is building games and so as they look to try to become the number one games manufacturer uh you know they were already 80% little 82% whatever it was ownership of cplay and our major Core Business uses these games for uh for the simple core Loop so Jackpot Party quick hit goldfish so on so on so on um and for them and and right like and this is kind of where we got together and we were like hey maybe it makes sense that we are together because there's a lot of benefit that can happen from this we are platform that uses these games in order to engage all of these

customers the you know millions of millions five five plus Millions users um and we get a ton of data from this this data can be used to help you create better slot machines not only can it be used to help you create better slot machines but we have real-time access access to these players what if we start taking Concepts AB testing them getting them in front of customers and get ideas of what art packages work math models work so on so on and we can do this in almost real time odds of building better slot machines go up better slot machines equal more engagement on my side more engagement on my side means more data means better sop and it became kind of this partnership where it was like a 1+ 1 equals 3 MH we believe we can grow

faster and better at s playay because of it light and wonder believes that they can become more and more dominant in not only landbased but eye gaming because they can build better slots with better data and it just the great news is not just the thing where both go up once it's cyclical hey better slots boom better data better engagement boom better slot and it just creates this like partnership that will be able to hopefully grow the co two companies together for the long-term future that that again makes sense you you tend to have this uh broader portfolio growth type of a mindset where where you look for the uh the synergies that are uh impossible to achieve by the company alone so you kind of need to add something else and and in that sense yeah they the uh the ones that make physical machines are actually being able to test virtual ones on a large

data set and then before building the other physical ones but I think there's I mean the there's the other uh not argument but other point why the acquisition would make sense for them is that looking at the stock it was fairly stable for them but looking at the stock of s playay it wasn't like even even from October of last year to October this year uh the stock price Tred with s playay yeah which is not what many uh gaming companies experience um so so there's there's that as well there's it's a profitable you know Casino Social Casino company on a growth path oh absolutely I I mean I think the timing was the right timing especially on uh especially on their side because you know we we didn't show and we haven't shown any slowing down um and in a world where you're the you're the kind of outlier grower you also tend to be

the outlier grower in valuation and so the each quarter that went by our evaluation kept going up and so making the move at that point was probably fiscally absolutely the right decision on their side you know because I mean ultimately you know for us it was an independ a SE of our board became an independent board and they're the ones that evaluated it wasn't like hey Josh Wilson do you want to do this like no a company that's not how that works they made an offer our independent board uh hired outside resources in order to evaluate the board um and came to what they believe is a very fair price and me as it looking from the outside was a very fair price I look at what other companies were being acquired for I look like What multiples and evaluations were today um it was the

right call uh it just happens to be on my side at the same point I can see the long-term vision of how this acquisition means that CCI playay can be here 20 30 years in the future and that's always very important to me was to build a legacy of a gaming company like I want to build the next EA or the next that company that's here Generations even even Generations After I'm Gone um and this is part of how we did that is making us the strongest we could possibly be in our core um and then from there just creating new ways to grow which is why I get to spend my time today and uh and how is it postacquisition like how has your job changed apart from not doing earning calls probably well you would you'd probably be invited in in most of them I

would assume because they want to show what is growing which is side playay every quarter but at least not being in charge of the full earning call um as much as I really really loved being a public company CEO and the pressure that comes with that um it was interesting I was sitting you know as I was telling our executive team like hey you know this is coming let me walk you through why um one of them like puts her head up and she's like does this mean you have more time to focus on the business like yeah probably about a month a quarter and do it um is a benefit like um Matt Wilson's an amazing leader uh he is one of the most car uh charismatic um he is a very Visionary thinker he is a great guy he's the CEO of light Wonder

uh I have a great rapport with him um but he would tell me right away he's like Josh focus on growing the business what you're doing focus on the culture that you built has has been the major focus and help me figure out how to tie things together for long-term growth for light and wonder but keep winning this is first and foremost keep winning and so for me it's been like I am spending more time focusing on the thing that I love I'm a product person at heart I'm a monetization and Economist at heart um you know I I was a games person who learned to be a CEO not a CEO who learned about games so I was backwards from most um which is probably another reason that we're different than most because the games

like at the end of the day games games games games games growth should take care of itself if you're doing that right and so um yeah like I'm actually very excited because I could spend more time doing what I love awesome that well that's that's that's great to hear and I kind of had the uh the hunch that this is uh net positive um it's not common that people would say that no I really I really miss preparing for for quarterly calls there's a lot of accounting a lot of comms work a lot of uh you know I've have uh I have friends in different positions it doesn't seem like the most fun part of the uh of the work I I mean I will say I didn't hate it because it forced me to learn how to talk to an entire industry of people who all have a different background than me and so um I'm super happy that I got the

chance to do it and I feel like I was very very good at it so I definitely wouldn't say I would never ever do it again what I would say is some people it was their passion for me it was just part of how do I make SCI play successful the games were my passion and still are yeah yeah that's what I meant I don't I don't think there's anybody who really hated it but it it was a shift of concentration from your business to communicating and and that happened multiple times four times a year which is quite taxing when all you want to do is focus on the the task at hand so there's a lot of uh given given you know ownership away so that you can focus on on the long-term uh success of the company by speaking the right words so and showing the right numbers well Josh thank you so much for coming again on on the podcast uh this was a very interesting conversation not a big Social Casino Player but uh I feel always smarter and uh and more educated

about this part of the market that I that I feel is like the uh The Operators market so uh it's uh it's always great to uh to hear you explain these these things first thank you for having me again like I said I love I love our conversations because they're always open honest they're good conversations and you know to be honest your background helped you ask really really good questions and sometimes there are like questions where I'm like I know how I got but I never thought how to articulate it because it's just there um and so I always like it because it like helps me think about it in a different way which is verbally and I like that to be really honest so anytime uh I would love to sit with you in chat so just all right you know where to find let's do that in a year I think a lot of things will happen again so so we can we can do a recap and and thank you for uh for

liking my questions so uh on that note c playay as you said is hiring is growing it's an operator's business so if you are really like I would assume that you want to people who are passionate about social casino but even an interest towards Social Casino but most importantly passion towards operating player customer focused games I think that's the uh the number one priority right yeah interesting enough um major shift we made is we stopped hiring just people who came from Social Casino um honestly we stopped hiring people just came from games um we hire people based on their critical thinking skills their sense of urgency uh how they want to uh how they want to be competitive um are they team players um and are they good people like I don't

it's it's interesting I I've started to have people sit on interviews with me I don't even look at their resume because it's not I can learn more in a 45 minute conversation than any resume will ever tell me and so for me it's about the quality of the individual than their past because most of the time the past isn't relevant anymore so I don't need to spend time there it's almost like a student and I hate I always to say it who who graduated college and actually used what they learned in is going from one company to another whole lot different yeah and it's kind of the way we think about it and yes we are hiring uh we're hiring worldwide um really product monetization engineering like the full Suite analytics uh Pro production so all the development team um but I did want to kind of give a quick shout out to my

team in Israel we have more than 300 people in our Israel office um you know what's happening there is a travesty no matter how you want to look at it no matter who you are um you know I'm personally a a large fan of the country of Israel I've always said it's my second home I spend more time there than I do any one office anywhere else in the world um but I really truly care about the people uh I very much care about our workers and my co-workers that I would say are my friends at this point in my life um and I wish them the best and just that this whole situation can end and everyone can feel safe again yeah that's a that's a powerful message um yeah what can I add to that so um on that note Josh thank you so much for uh for for being on the podcast you're very welcome and I look forward to a year all right goodbye

everybody [Music] bye thank you for listening to the whole episode if you like this podcast please do leave a comment and share the episode if you want to access the deconstructor of fun Community with hundreds of Senior Games Folk go to our website and apply to the slack group and if you want to get notified of all the new content we have coming out every week do subscribe to the weekly deconstructor of fun newsletter finally do remember we love you guys and we appreciate you guys catch you next time