Blue Guru Games

About the Company

Blue Guru Games is an HTML5 online slot developer that works as the in-house slot studio for LeoVegas and the company's dedicated Mobile Group. LeoVegas, which owns 85% of the company announced the new studio on May 3, 2021.

The studio will produce exclusive games for the LeoVegas Group as well as for other operators.

The announcement came on the heels of other developments for the Stockholm, Sweden-based company founded in 2011. They previously launched Pink Casino in Canada as their first international brand outside of Europe.

This was followed by becoming the first iGaming company to launch in the Nordic region over the Google Play app. In addition, they acquired the sportsbetting brand Expekt Nordics, a greenfield player in the Nordic markets.

Blue Guru Games is headed up by Andrew Braithwaite of the gamification innovator Unibo. The first titles were scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of the inaugural year. The firm hopes to release about 20 new tiles over the next two years.

LeoVegas and LeoVentures team members involved in the launch included LeoVegas CEO, Gustaf Hagman; CPTO and LeoVegas board member, Mattias Wedar; Mobile Gaming Group director Philip Doftvik, and Group Casino Director James Ford.

While the new venture wasn't announced until early May, new social media accounts for the studio were created nearly a month earlier.

Studio head and Blue Guru Games CEO, Andy B. brings a quarter of a century worth of production experience to the venture beginning his career with Virgin UK in 1995 as a music producer.

He later went on to spend time as head of casino and content with Betsson Group, did a stint at Redbet beginning in 2010, became casino director at Mr Green, and then returned to Betsson for a few years as managing director and group director of gaming.

From early 2019 he's been with Unibo as CCO and now in parallel with Blue Guru since the launch.

The fact that his "full-time job" is executing the actualization of the new studio taken with the knowledge that he is still on with Unibo might give us a clue about what to expect from game releases when they to fruition.

Software and Games

Readers who play at Montecryptos Casino may have participated in one of Unibo's gamification campaigns in the fall of 2020 - Season 1 of the Count's Treasure Hunt.

The CEO's career portfolio doesn't show a high level of participation in game design, engineering, maths, or art and production. However, it does show fairly recent documented case studies in gamification, engagement, and loyalty engineering.

With those two pieces of the puzzle found, I think it's a good bet to imagine that the games we will see from the Blue Guru will be built with the ability to easily accept gamification components as built-in promotional tools for LeoVegas and other operations the games will be marketed to.

We expect to see tournaments, races, missions, chases, jackpots, and random prize drops.

You might ask yourself...

Why are we so confident in that prognostication?

LeoVegas may be #KingofCasino and a simple in-house game studio may help them capture more of the value chain, but they are still in a highly competitive industry that is evolving rapidly on all fronts.

Blue Guru competitors include names like Quickspin, Pragmatic Play, and Yggdrasil to name a few.

Each of those developers employs dynamic in-game marketing tools such as Achievement Engines, Boost and Brag, Drops & Wins, etc.

It makes perfect sense that Leo Mobile Group would intend to compete in that area in a meaningful way. Add the Blue Guru CEO's continuing association with Unibo and it's a near certainty.

Disclaimer: Our crystal ball may be due for maintenance!

Intellectual Property and game creation

The deal structure with LeoVegas owning 85% of the studio means that they will control the intellectual property (IP) rights. The only principle we find listed for Blue Guru is Andy B. This means we have no way to dig up art portfolios, showreels, sketches, maths bonafides, or anything else about the rest of the creation and production team.

Without references to existing games that we can crudely reverse engineer to suss out the sophistication of the maths or mechanics, and without even a taste of what the art, narrative, animation, and eventual user experience will be like, we simply can't predict anything for you reliably.

We do, however, have one minuscule clue. That along with the hope that we are correct in our prognostication of gamification elements presents some exciting possibilities that we will leave up to our readers' imaginations.

About all we know for sure is what Blue Guru hath proclaimed:

"We tell stories…

Blue Guru weaves together stories from history and mythology, to bring fascinating, intelligent and engaging games into the world. More than just a gaming experience".

If these games are built from the ground up to incorporate fascinating, intelligent, and engaging journeys into the narratives via gamification (tournaments, races, missions, chases, jackpots, and random prize drops)...

If that's where we are...

The online gaming world is about to change in a very big way.

Even if our prediction fails, the quality of games produced for the parent company/partner is bound to improve the gambling landscape.

CEO Hagman explained in a press release, inter alia, that LeoVegas has been creating exclusive unique content for their brands for quite some time with the help of third-party studios. He added, "...but now the time is right to take the step to do game development entirely on our own". 

One such slot was commissioned from Relax Gaming by the fairly recent LeoVegas acquisition, CasinoGrounds.

Iron Bank was released in early May of 2020. The game has 6 reels with 4 visible in play positions each and 4096 ways to win. The free spins round can yield a return to player percentage of 97%.

The Heist-themed game can return a single spin win of up to x49,998 your stake. It's a very high volatility game (as evidenced by the huge potential jackpot spin) and can be played for as little as €0.1 per spin or as much as €20 per spin according to the official literature.

The game has a bonus buy feature. The overall theoretical return to player percentage is not stated nor is the hit frequency or balance of RTP between the base game and free spins, but the base game RTP is 96.2%

Unlocking features allow players to explore different sections of the bank in order to heist bigger rewards.

Returning to Hagman, he went on to explain that they have not only knowledge of casinos but data to help them craft games specifically for their existing customers. As well, "These may be everything from niche, local games for individual markets to broad international games".

While he was forward-looking as far as how long it might take to grow the new metric into a positive revenue streamer, he noted the flexibility they will have in creating their own games. Building on the synergies inherent in capturing a link in the overall value chain he said, "...we will create games and unique characters that can be used in our marketing, which will build stronger loyalty to our brands".