Edvardas Sadovskis, ICONIC21: “Arrow Chase opened a new category, and that is the rarest thing in this industry right now”

The company’s CPO discusses how Arrow Chase was designed to move beyond traditional crash games by creating a continuous, shared real-time experience inspired by trading platforms and live market behaviour.

Exclusive interview.- In an industry often driven by iterations of existing mechanics, Edvardas Sadovskis, CPO at ICONIC21, believes Arrow Chase represents something fundamentally different. In this interview, the executive explains how the title’s continuous gameplay, multiplayer tension and market-inspired visual language helped create what he describes as an entirely new category within igaming, while also outlining why operators have quickly recognised its potential.

At what point during development did you realise you were building something that needed its own category?

We knew we were in new territory when the most accurate way to describe Arrow Chase was simply: nothing like this exists in the industry. In any other context, that might feel like a risk. In igaming, at this moment, it is the most powerful position a new product can occupy. Arrow Chase opened a new category, and that is the rarest thing in this industry right now.

Arrow Chase removes rounds, resets and downtime entirely. How important was that continuous experience in differentiating the product from traditional crash games?

The continuous format was the first decision, and everything else followed from it. Once you remove the round, the entire architecture of the game changes. The multiplayer session becomes natural. The automatic payout becomes necessary. The aesthetic it has becomes the only visual language that makes sense. The distance between Arrow Chase and crash games becomes impossible to ignore. Crash is episodic, as it builds tension, releases it, and resets. Arrow Chase is not releasing. The tension is continuous, the arrow keeps moving, and the player stays inside the experience rather than watching it from the outside. This makes it a different product entirely.

The game creates a shared, real-time experience where every player watches the same arrow movement together. How central was that sense of “shared tension” to the original concept?

There is a quality to collective experience that cannot be simulated. The moment when your outcome and someone else’s are happening at the same time, in the same game, in the same session, brings much stronger trust. Markets have it. Sport has it. We wanted Arrow Chase to sit in that space. Instead of pure solitary play like in slots, we took the raw shared reality of watching the same thing move and knowing that everyone around you is feeling the same thing. That is harder to build than it sounds and more powerful than most formats attempt.

“There is a quality to collective experience that cannot be simulated.”

Edvardas Sadovskis, CPO at ICONIC21.

The visual language feels heavily inspired by trading platforms and live market movement. What made that style the right fit for this type of experience?

Because it was the most honest choice, billions of people have watched a price chart and felt something: the need to act, the fear of being wrong, the satisfaction of reading the movement correctly. That behavioural vocabulary existed long before Arrow Chase, and with this game, we gave players somewhere to direct it. The current aesthetic is the game telling the truth about what it is. An arrow moving up and down across a screen is one of the most instinctively readable images in the world. That familiarity is what makes Arrow Chase instantly learnable.

You describe Arrow Chase as something players can understand and engage with within 30 seconds. How difficult was it to balance simplicity with enough depth to keep players engaged long term?

The simplicity was protected throughout development. Every time something more complex had to enter the conversation, we asked: Does this serve the player or does it serve us? The depth in Arrow Chase comes from the design itself: always moving. The mechanic fits in a sentence. The experience lasts as long as the player wants it to. That combination of immediately legible and endlessly engaging is the hardest thing to design and the most valuable thing you can have when you achieve it.

Launching an entirely new format is very different from releasing another slot or crash variation. How have operators reacted to Arrow Chase so far?

Operators understand the opportunity very fast. Arrow Chase does not fit traditional evaluation frameworks, but that is precisely what makes the conversation interesting rather than complicated. Our soft launch confirmed what we suspected, which is that when you put something genuinely new in front of an operator who has spent years looking at variations of the same formats, the interest is very high. There was a gap that we managed to fill with Arrow Chase.

Do you think the igaming industry has become too reliant on iterating existing mechanics rather than creating genuinely new formats?

The industry is exceptionally good at optimising and genuinely cautious about originating. That is a rational commercial response. Iteration is faster, cheaper, and lower risk. But it produces a slow narrowing of what players are actually offered, and eventually, players feel that narrowing, even if they cannot name it. The appetite for something genuinely different is enormous. Crash proved that. The question is whether providers are willing to absorb the risk that real originality requires. We decided we were, and Arrow Chase is the result.

“The industry is exceptionally good at optimising and genuinely cautious about originating.”

Edvardas Sadovskis, CPO at ICONIC21.

Looking ahead, do you see Arrow Chase as a single product or the beginning of a much broader category for ICONIC21?

Arrow Chase is a door. We built it to open a category. The format has a life well beyond a single title. Whether that unfolds through Arrow Chase alone or through a wider family of track games, arrow games or what the industry will decide to call it is a conversation that has started happening.