Despite being a relative newcomer to the live casino space, Imagine Live has made rapid progress and harbors ambitious goals to challenge the industry’s dominant players.
While slot games continue to reign supreme across the iGaming landscape, the Digitain-backed brand is pursuing a clear strategy to close the gap—aiming to elevate the global appeal of live dealer experiences.
In a recent interview with iGaming Expert, CEO Martin Martirosyan shed light on the company’s vision, detailing its geographical expansion plans and what lies ahead on the strategic roadmap.
iGaming Expert: We’ll start by looking at the intense competition faced within the industry. Could you talk us through Imagine Live’s strategy in keeping up and aiming to soar above the competition?
Martin Martirosyan: As you know, Imagine Live is a relatively new brand. We only started a couple of years ago, but over this period of time we have shown a very aggressive growth strategy.
Within the last two years we’ve grown from 20 or so tables to more than a hundred. In terms of territorial expansion, we started as a business in Armenia, are now live in Romania and more will be unlocked very soon. We’ll be announcing those new studio locations in the near future.
Our strategy has been clear from Day 1 and that is to be one of the leading live casino suppliers, and to be able to provide very strong and quality content to operators and their players.
iGX: Related to this previous question, what would you highlight as some of the major recent developments that have helped push yourselves forward?
MM: Despite being relatively new in the market, I would say that the main milestones for our live casino business is the rapid expansion in the regulated markets.
Over the last year, we have obtained our Malta Gaming Authority license, as well as licenses in the UK, Brazil, Sweden and Greece. We also obtained our Romanian license; many more are in progress. Regarding Romania our new studio is now operational with over 1,600 square meters, and we will soon open another market with a studio of over 3,000 square meters. Rapid expansion in regulated markets are key milestones for us.
Another important milestone for us is an expansion of our game content. We started with classic games like Roulette, Blackjack and baccarat, but now we are offering a wide range of game shows and bringing a lot of innovations to the market. The portfolio is now very comprehensive with many more games under development.
iGX: We’ve spoken a lot about markets on the geographical front, what would you identify as Imagine Live’s strongest markets, and what do you think it is that appeals to players within those?
MM: Based on the expansion of our licensing catalogue, you can understand that our strongest intention is to expand into more regulated European markets. That is the trigger that we’re pushing.
We are paying strong attention to those markets, and that’s why we have put a footprint within Romania – so we can pay further attention to the Central European market.
Where’s next? Obviously LatAm is getting a lot of attention, and that was the reason that we were one of the first ones to apply to the Brazilian regulator and we passed it very successfully.
LatAm stands as a very strong market for us and our strategy for the market is to rapidly increase the content for that specific market, especially in the Spanish and the Portuguese languages. We are of course offering localized language tables, and we will continue to add to these numbers to meet the demands of our partners.
iGX: Looking at the online casino landscape as a whole, slots are undoubtedly the huge and dominant player. What does live casino have to do to bridge that gap, and what challenges are primarily associated with such an undertaking?
MM: Of course, slots always have had the lions share, but we know that operators are always focused on growth their live casino vertical, everything we do we focus on enabling those operators to achieve their goals.
The competitors of Imagine Live are giants in the market, and this alone tells us that there is a strong attention from players to live content.
The only thing that we all need to keep an eye on is technological developments, and making the content as entertaining as as we possibly can. This is very important for the growth of live content.
iGX: We’ve spoken about a lot of markets through this discussion. When it comes to the difficulties of keeping pace and maintaining an upwards trajectory across so many jurisdictions, what role does localization place? How do you tailor your content to meet differing requirements?
MM: That’s the key. Without having truly localized content, you simply cannot obtain the players of any market. At Imagine Live, we first try to localize our content very specifically from the language aspects. As I mentioned previously our language table portfolio is expanding all the time, and certainly opening the studio in Romania has & will continue to facilitate the growth.
Second is the need to understand the overall culture of the market, and here we are using our game show content where we can localize to meet very specific requirements and make it very tailored to market needs.
iGX: : Are there any other major innovations or updates that are a cause for optimism?
MM: My advice is always to follow us on social media personally, because we have a very aggressive roadmap over the next coming months, our marketing team is very active in updating LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook etc.
As you can see here at iGB Live, this is the second show that we are presenting with something really, really new to the market. This time we are proudly showcasing our latest wheel game.
But we have something very exciting. A new, good strong collaboration in a well-known market. So, follow us and then you’ll be excited as I am.
