“Solidarity is, and will continue to be, top of mind for Synergy Blue”

(Exclusive interview).- Georg Washington, CEO at Synergy Blue, granted an interview to Focus Gaming News and he talked about the current situation within the gaming industry.

US.- Covid-19 has come to stay here for a while and many companies are showing their solidary side. Synergy Blue is engaged with its employees and partners and its managment is working hard on this.

Firstly, and it’s important to ask given the scale of the crisis, how is or how has the impact of Covid-19 affected Synergy Blue’s business operations?

There is a lot of uncertainty throughout the industry due to COVID and we are all in it together.  From Synergy Blue’s perspective, the team is working from home, focusing on moving our business forward and continuing with our development plans. We are also doing what we can to support our industry and its recovery. 

How will you handle the upcoming challenges in the global economic downturn?

This is an uncertain time for everyone, so it’s difficult to map out a future strategy when situations are evolving day-to-day. Our plan is to remain flexible and nimble during these times, so that we can be ready once the industry is able to come together in person again.  Solidarity is, and will continue to be, top of mind for Synergy Blue. 

If we leave Coronavirus for a while, how do you set up for business this year?

2020 has been quite the year, that’s for sure with a lot of unexpected twists and turns, but we’re staying the course. We recently completed trials in our home state of Nevada, so we’re now approved by the Nevada Gaming Commission for statewide distribution of our platform and games. We’ve been working toward this milestone for a long time and reaching it is a testament to the talent of our entire team and our casino partners.  We’re all excited and grateful to be able to contribute to local and industry recovery once the time comes. 

For the rest of this year, we’re just taking it one step at a time.

Our plan is to remain flexible and nimble during these times, so that we can be ready once the industry is able to come together in person again. 

Georg Washington, CEO at Synergy Blue

In the last years, Synergy Blue has been expanding its business within Asia, could you tell us more about that?

Asia is a major center for the casino industry and we’re happy to have built a number of relationships in the area, including our distribution agreement with Jade, who has been great to work with. Our preference is to partner with in-country distributors because they know their market and are able to bring our games to market with amazing support. 

What differentiates Synergy Blue’s entertainment integration to your competitors? How will you build on this for the future?

At Synergy Blue, we hold strong to the mantra introduced to us by Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari — games need to be easy to learn, hard to master. So we’ve put a lot of time and research into making our games fun, intuitive, and simple to understand, yet challenging enough to engage players again and again. 

Skill-influenced gaming (or “Interactive EGMs” as they are sometimes called) are still very new to both players and operators. By using familiar, arcade-style hardware and mobile-style game play, most players understand what to do right away on our games. However familiarizing them with new betting components is more of a challenge, as is pinpointing the right math variants. These are the areas that we’ve spent the most time in and we’re constantly learning more. Now that we’re through Nevada trials, we’ll soon be able to gather more player feedback and further advance our game play to make it an even more fun and seamless experience, to compete with the abundance of other entertainment experiences available.

No one knows what will happen when casinos open up again, but we believe that people will continue to seek out fun, social experiences. The games we make modernise and add variety to the traditional casino gaming staples, and our research has shown that they’ll attract a new variety of demographics as well. Hopefully, in this way, we can help to rebuild our industry and make it even better than before.