SBC News’ recently spoke to Kirill Nekrasov, BETBY’s Head of Innovation and R&D about SlotBet Games, a new product designed to close the gap between sportsbook and casinos.
In the first part of the conversation, Nekrasov explained the design choices of SlotBet Games and the first product, BETBY Slots, and outlined the strategy of why players want experiences that combine sportsbook and casino experiences.
Now, in part two, Nekrasov outlines the benefits that operators can get from the solution. He touches on how BETBY SlotBets can drive player retention across platforms and monetise on passive UI space.
We have seen other suppliers experimenting with sports content inside casino-style formats. What is the difference in your view?
The question we always ask is: what actually powers the result?
There are RNG-based products where the presentation looks sports-related, or where a casino mechanic sits alongside sporting content. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is a different proposition. For us, the sport cannot just be a decoration around the casino experience.
If the basketball game changes, the SlotBet changes. If there is a foul, a miss or a stoppage, that matters. The live sporting event is continuously feeding the game.
That connection is one of our biggest USPs because it means the player gets the familiarity of casino mechanics without losing the authenticity and unpredictability of real sport.
What is in this for an existing sportsbook player who already understands traditional betting?
This is a very important point because SlotBets is not only a casino acquisition tool.
There are plenty of sportsbook users who already know exactly what a handicap or total is and, for them, the value is different. It is about more interaction during the event.
You might have placed your main bets before the basketball game starts, but now during the match you have this additional layer where every 15 seconds there is something happening. It basically turns following the match into a continuous entertainment session.
We think that is increasingly important. A sportsbook cannot assume that because somebody placed one bet, they are going to spend the next two hours staring at the event page. You have to keep earning their attention, especially when taking into consideration the short attention spans that characterise the new generation of players.
And commercially, where do you see the strongest benefit for operators? There are several layers.
The obvious one is cross-sell. You have something that can live in sportsbook and casino and make sense to both audiences. Then you have the possibility of increasing betting frequency and session engagement because the playing cycles are so short.
But there is another use case that I find especially interesting: the match tracker.
Historically, sportsbooks have given some of their most valuable event-page space to the match tracker. It is useful, of course, because it tells the player what is happening. But commercially, it is passive. SlotBets can rethink that completely.
You can integrate the live sports information and the gameplay into the same area, and suddenly that space is not only showing you what happened but giving you something to interact with.
So you potentially turn traditionally passive screen space into monetised gameplay without taking the player away from the event.
Does that mean you see SlotBets primarily as a sportsbook product or a casino product?
Both, and that is the point.
Inside a sportsbook, it can enhance the live-event journey and potentially take the place of a conventional match tracker.
Inside a casino, it becomes a very simple sports-based product for a player who may never normally open the sportsbook.
You could even imagine it sitting in both places for the same operator and serving different acquisition journeys. There is also retail potential because the slot-style interface is immediately recognisable in a casino environment. You can introduce real sports content without asking a casino-first player to learn an entirely new interface.
If SlotBet Games genuinely becomes the category we believe it can become, I don’t think people will necessarily ask whether it belongs to sportsbook or casino. The interesting thing is precisely that it belongs between them.
Basketball is the first real sport, but you are also working with esports. What does that roadmap look like?
Real live sports are absolutely the centre of the proposition, and SlotBasketball is important because it demonstrates that SlotBets can take an actual sporting event and turn its live action into this new type of gameplay.
But at the same time, we already have a very strong esports ecosystem through our award-winning proprietary esports feed Betby Games, so naturally we are looking at how the SlotBet concept can extend there as well. I can unveil that we are currently working on titles including SlotSoccer, SlotCricket, SlotHockey and SlotPingPong.
If you ask me what the benefit is, I would say availability. Real sports have calendars, off-hours and seasonal gaps, while esports can run 24/7, so ultimately the two can complement each other.
We do not want to pretend every title will arrive at exactly the same time, this is a developing ecosystem. But strategically, having real sports at the core and 24/7 esports around them gives operators a very interesting content mix.
Creating a new category also means there is no guarantee players will adopt it. How confident are you that SlotBet Games will actually become a category?
There is no honest way to guarantee that.
You can build something you believe is excellent, test it, talk to operators and see very positive reactions, but ultimately the player decides whether a new behaviour becomes normal.
We are confident enough to invest heavily in it, but I would never say success is automatic. What gives us confidence is that we have been through similar situations before with products that challenged the usual way of doing things.
For instance, Betby Games was a very unconventional proposition when we developed it, but today it is a multiple award-winning product and contributes around 15% of BETBY’s total GGR.
More recently, we launched BETBY Predictions, where we took prediction markets and created the industry’s first fixed-odds prediction markets feed for sportsbooks.
So we have a track record of looking at something the industry is doing in one way and asking whether there is a completely different model.
SlotBets is probably the boldest example yet because this time we are not only saying, “Here is a new product.” We are saying, “We think there is room for a new games category.”
Now we have to earn the right for the industry to agree with us.
How do you make sure innovation starts with an industry need rather than simply trying to do something new?
That is really the key for us. We do not start by saying, “We need to invent something nobody has done before.”
We start by looking at where operators and players still face friction, where there is a gap in the market, or where the existing approach can be improved.
SlotBets is a good example. The challenge is clear: sportsbook and casino audiences are difficult to connect, while live sportsbook experiences can still contain too much passive time.
You can see the same thinking in other cases. Our award-winning AI Labs suite applies AI to real sportsbook needs, while eVaquejada showed how innovation can also come through localisation, becoming the first esports title built around that sport because there was genuine demand for it.
So the innovation label comes afterwards. What matters first is examining the industry, identifying a real problem and building something that makes sense for both operators and players.
Finally, when someone sees SlotBets for the first time, what reaction do you want them to have?
Probably: “Why did nobody do this before?”
That is usually a good sign with a product.
I don’t want somebody to need a ten-minute explanation. You should see the live basketball game, spin the reels, try to create a winning combination, and understand that the outcome of this combination is based on 15 second intervals.
If we can make something genuinely new feel obvious once you experience it, then I think we have done our job.