Petter Viklund on GO Momentum: “Regulation should raise the bar for innovation, not lower it” 

Play’n GO’s Head of Product Strategy says GO Momentum applies the supplier’s game-focused thinking to promotions, rewards and the wider player experience.

Key takeaways:

• Play’n GO has launched GO Momentum, an ecosystem that brings together its promotional technology for operators and players.
• Head of product strategy Petter Viklund says the platform aims to improve the player experience around casino games, including rewards, campaigns and promotions.
• Viklund argues that innovation should make experiences simpler, with sophisticated technology remaining largely invisible to players.
• He says Play’n GO treats compliance, transparency and player protection as fundamental product requirements rather than restrictions.
• GO Momentum is intended to evolve through feedback from licensed operators, with Viklund describing it as “very much the beginning”.

Exclusive interview.- Petter Viklund, head of product strategy at Play’n GO, sat down with Focus Gaming News to discuss the launch of GO Momentum, how player expectations are changing and why the regulated market should be where the industry’s best innovation happens. 

Play’n GO has just launched GO Momentum. What is it, and what are you trying to achieve with it? 

We’ve spent more than 20 years thinking about how to create great casino entertainment, and naturally much of that conversation has focused on the games themselves. But the player experience doesn’t begin and end with the game. 

There’s a much broader experience happening around it. Operators want to engage and reward their players in interesting ways, they want to build campaigns around great content, and players increasingly expect those interactions to be as intuitive and entertaining as everything else they encounter online. 

That’s really where GO Momentum comes from. It brings together our promotional technology into one ecosystem, but the ambition is bigger than simply putting a name around a collection of tools. 

We want to apply the same level of thinking, technology and attention to the player experience around our games as we’ve always applied to making the games themselves. 

Why is now the right time to make that move? 

I think player expectations have moved enormously, and that creates both a challenge and an opportunity for our industry. 

We all interact every day with digital products that have become incredibly good at removing friction. You press something and it happens. You receive something and it appears immediately. You don’t need an instruction manual to understand the experience. 

Casino entertainment has to meet those expectations too. 

For us, that means looking beyond the individual game and asking what else we can improve. How does a player receive a reward? How do you create excitement around a promotion? How do all of these interactions feel like part of one joined-up entertainment experience? 

Some of those questions require quite sophisticated technology to answer. But ironically, the better that technology becomes, the less the player should notice it. 

What does that mean in practice? What does a really good promotional experience look like? 

One of the principles we keep coming back to is that innovation only matters if it makes the experience better. 

That sounds simple, but I think it’s an important distinction. More functionality isn’t automatically more innovation. Sometimes you’re innovating precisely so that you can make something feel simpler. 

Take the way a reward is delivered. Underneath that experience there may be a lot happening technologically, particularly when you’re operating at significant scale. But none of that complexity is the player’s problem. 

The player’s experience should be: I did this, and now my reward is here. 

That’s the standard we should be aiming for. The technology can be incredibly sophisticated underneath, but what it produces should feel completely natural. 

“More functionality isn’t automatically more innovation. Sometimes you’re innovating precisely so that you can make something feel simpler.”

Petter Viklund, head of product strategy at Play’n GO.

Play’n GO has put regulated markets at the heart of the GO Momentum story. Why is that important?

There is an idea you occasionally hear that regulation and innovation somehow sit on opposite sides of the table. I don’t accept that. 

I actually think the regulated market should be where the best innovation happens. 

When you’re building specifically for regulated environments, you understand the framework you’re working within. You understand your responsibilities to players. You’re working closely with licensed operators who understand their customers and markets extremely well. 

That gives you an excellent foundation on which to innovate. 

The alternative is to treat areas like compliance, transparency or player protection as restrictions that have to be designed around. We see them as fundamental product requirements. If you begin with those things in mind, you can still be enormously ambitious about the entertainment experience you create. 

That’s something Play’n GO has believed for a long time. The challenge is not choosing between exciting products and responsible ones. The challenge is creating products that are both. 

“I actually think the regulated market should be where the best innovation happens.” 

Petter Viklund, head of product strategy at Play’n GO.

How important are operators in shaping what you build? 

Some of our best product conversations start with an operator telling us something isn’t quite working the way they’d like it to. 

That’s incredibly valuable. 

Good product development isn’t sitting in a room and dreaming up features. It’s understanding what operators are trying to achieve and then working backwards from there. How do they want to engage their players? Where is the friction today? What do they wish they could do that they currently can’t? 

And then there’s another question that I think is just as important: what will actually make the experience better for the player? 

You need both perspectives. 

That’s particularly important with GO Momentum because we’re not trying to build one promotional mechanic and declare the job finished. We’re creating an ecosystem that can evolve. The feedback loop with our operator partners will therefore be hugely important in deciding where we take it. 

So should we see GO Momentum as a finished product or the beginning of something? 

Very much the beginning. 

GO Momentum gives us a foundation on which we can keep building. But I wouldn’t want us sitting here in two years talking about exactly the same capabilities we have today. 

The interesting thing about technology is how quickly expectations change. Things that seemed remarkable a few years ago quickly become things people simply expect to work. 

Our responsibility is to keep moving with that. We should be asking how we remove more friction, how we help operators create better experiences, how we make those experiences more entertaining for players, and how we continue doing all of that to the standards expected in regulated markets. 

We’ve been asking ourselves those kinds of questions about games for more than 20 years. GO Momentum is really about applying that same curiosity and ambition to a much wider part of casino entertainment. 

And I think we’ve only just started exploring what’s possible. 

By Focus Gaming News Editorial Team