Are you struggling to stay competitive in your industry? TESTA is a Crowdtesting Platform for the iGaming Industry and is the key to your success and keeping your competitive edge. By leveraging crowd-sourced testing and market research, TESTA will give you a deeper understanding of your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, as well as identify critical performance and compatibility issues that could be hindering your own product's success.
Kyle Wiltshire, CEO of TESTA, highlights the importance of a comprehensive, market-specific approach to quality assurance; from understanding the impact of device compatibility and latency on the user experience, to ensuring seamless payment processing and localised UX. By embracing these strategies, you can position your gaming business for growth, stay ahead of the competition, and deliver an exceptional experience to your customers, no matter where they are located.
0:00 Crowd-Sourced QA: The Secret Weapon for Gaming Success
1:20 Specialized QA Platform Empowers Gaming Businesses to Thrive
3:52 Unlock Your Gaming Potential with Insider Crowd-Testing Insights
6:25 Mastering Performance and Compatibility: Key Factors for Gaming
9:17 Gain the Competitive Edge: Crowd-Sourced Market Research Strategies
11:00 Dominate the Gaming Market with Crowd-Sourced Competitive Analysis
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Welcome to “15 Minute Mastery,” the ultimate show for iGaming professionals, hosted by industry veteran Dmitry Belianin. With over 17 years of experience, Dmitry brings unparalleled insights and wisdom from top industry experts in just 15 minutes. Each episode delivers actionable strategies from all iGaming verticals to improve your personal and business performance. As the founder of Belianin, Dmitry also shares his expertise in nurturing high-potential iGaming startups. Subscribe to “15 Minute Mastery” for concise, high-value content and stay ahead in the competitive world of iGaming.
When you have your own team doing any sort of QA or validating what you've built, they're coming at it with certain biases and they're also probably physically in one location. So you've got a QA lab that's in one place and maybe they have, you know, a couple iPhones or Android devices, but they're not really looking at it through all of the other layers that separate you from the real customers. You're listening to 15-minute mastering, a show that empowers you with insights from leading iGaming experts to enhance your personal or business performance. The show is brought to you by the EI-powered Data Analytics Platform Blasp and supported by Ted Given Affiliate and Media Company already media, Lala Stars, the leading casino partnership program and Next.io, the world's iGaming community. Hey guys and welcome to this episode of 15-Minutes Mastery. We got Kyle, a CEO at TASTA and TASTA is the worldwide quality testing service built specially for iGaming. TASTA helps iGaming businesses to improve their software quality to reduce time-to-market and uncover things about the places they operate. To be honest Kyle probably is one of the world's leading experts in product development and infrastructure and probably the only person iGaming who loudly speaks about the importance of product localization, speed and exploring the way how your product can look better in the eyes of the target audience on ground. Hey Kyle it's so nice to have you here and i cannot wait to have a chat with you about all these cool topics we will find for this conversation. Well thanks to me too that's quite the introduction and looking forward to the conversation as well. So what inspired you to create you know this kind of specialized QA and testing platform for iGaming industry and what kind of you know key principles you focused during the you know its inception stage. So we found at TASTA because we always did a lot of testing in our technology business. So to take you back about six seven years we launched a company called Gigantec in based out of Taiwan. Mostly focused on iGaming providers and operators in Asia and what Gigantec did was it really focused on some of those localization issues you discussed making sure games were performant and fast, security, uptime all these very unique technical challenges that the industry sees in Asia that they may not see in other markets. So as we are going along with these projects and you know making improvements what we found is really important is one we need to tell our clients what things looked like before we started working with them what they looked like in comparison to their competitors and then what it looked like after we were working for them. So we always had a ton of data and testing from within the markets both with real people and some synthetic tools but we found that the real people ended up kind of serving a need that was undiscovered. We would often finish our kind of projects you know deliver the improvements then our clients would say hey that was you know really interesting you had a person on the ground in whatever Thailand how about Japan how about Malaysia how about India and eventually when enough people requested this the light bulb went off and we saw there was an opportunity for a business into of itself with crowd testing. This is a really cool concept and to be honest you know we were doing this a lot ourselves in previous companies but you know we never had someone doing this for us and like can you explain like the real benefits of using you know the crowdsourced approach for QA and testing especially night gaming and how it's compared to like traditional methods. So the main benefit is that when you have your own team doing any sort of QA or validating what you've built they're coming at it with certain biases and they're also probably physically in one location. So you've got a QA lab that's in one place and maybe they have you know a couple iPhones or Android devices but they're not really looking at it through all of the other layers that separate you from the real customers. That could be the internet service providers they're using it could be very different types of devices. It could be physical distance. So you know spinning a slot reel when the server is you know a one-hour flight away it's very different than 14, 15, 16 hours away. At a certain point the speed of light actually becomes a consideration and how far are you sending that data? How fast is the bandwidth between these locations? All these things you're kind of flying blind on unless you can actually get information from within those markets. If you extend that a little further you start looking at your partnerships you look at payment providers or content providers or various sorts of plugins and widgets you've got in the site and if those things aren't optimized for the region then they're going to pull you down as well. So even if you've done your job perhaps your vendors and all the people that you depend on haven't done a very good job and that's going to cause issues. So there's all sorts of details that get lost when you're looking at kind of a homogenous team that's testing quality and they're just far away from the market both physically and sometimes in terms of language, culture, infrastructure, devices what have you. So you mentioned quite a few like aspects of performance and especially the user compatibility I remember that you know in one of the studies we've done previously in one of my companies we've realized even the brightness of the sun and the colors inside of the products were one of the most critical elements because the users couldn't see a certain elements and you know this leads me to like a thought on like your experience in particular. So what kind of like a critical aspects of performance and maybe like compatibility testing you guys like seen you know like in the companies you worked with in the markets you kind of tested like if you can name like the top five most critical aspects of performance and compatibility testing you've seen. Speed's obviously a big one I mean for every I think there's a famous Google study for every extra hundred milliseconds on a page you know the bounce rate goes up by a certain amount. So speed for especially the operator's sites just how fast the pages are loading and key processes when people are searching for games doing a first time deposit. So that's very important. Device compatibility is huge so if you are looking at a market that maybe has you know they're a bit mid-tier or it's kind of the lower income segment of the country sometimes you can be looking at a hundred and fifty dollar hundred dollar android device. We had a client come to us with you know a real headache where they had they were a provider and they had a client of theirs complaining that a game was extremely slow they had tested this to you know their wits end with all these tools and all these things and it took them months and months and months and one of they eventually came to realize was the provider had somebody with just really low-end android devices and it was a very nice slot game it had lots of web GL and JavaScript and fancy things and it was simply the processing power of the phone so even if you've built the software well and there's you know a great CDN and servers are nearby and all these things if you're not looking at it through the local lens and understanding well what kind of devices are they using to actually load these games things can hurt right you get into things like device heat and everything that can follow from that the phone's working too hard it gets hot that's something unpleasant users will note so that's a big one in terms of other issues live videos very challenging again it's streamed from one location same with live odds so you're often looking at making quick decisions say a live dealer video it needs to sync up with the actual event that's happening in the studio you can't replicate the studio to a different location it's either in Asia or in Europe and that video feed is going to travel with a certain amount of delay so what happens in the video needs to match in what happens on the game screen slot reels turning are similar if you know we've seen issues where somebody's in Asia or Latin America and their game server is still in the UK or Germany or whatever for every slot reel spin if you're adding 100 200 milliseconds of latency just due to distance compound this over millions of spins and you're talking about a major major you know change to your turnover each month so all of these things kind of compound have mostly talked about providers but on the operator side I mean obviously the payment methods are a huge huge thing that's kind of the number one thing operators come to us with it's just can we validate that payments actually work in this market and sometimes even if payments work it's more about getting into the details I mean the PSP will tell you okay you know we got this code it's approved but what does that look like with real money what does it look like when you take say 25 euros bring it right through the system what does it show up on the bank statement as how long is it take to clear these are all things that you may not see until you've actually taken money from end to end I guess the last thing I'll add is just kind of general UX and exploratory and languages are huge often when people go into more distant markets they use translation houses that translate things and they may get the terms wrong they may not be casino related they may be missing some of the marketing speak from the term so they may be using words that aren't very friendly to UX like you know in English we'll often say join instead of sign up or you know get this instead of do this work right and you can make all those mistakes in other languages and all these things that they compound right oh yeah yeah for sure and why you were giving me this least I was thinking about the possible user persona like you were mentioning operators you were mentioning you know like game providers payment providers I think you know your approach towards crowd source QA is actually has so much more like in-depth in the industry and you know I think in not many companies and people understand the importance of it so yeah it's really cool that you've highlighted some of those and it actually led me to to the next point which I really wanted to hear your thoughts about like so you were mentioning like you know markets a lot and I was wondering like how do like the market research and benchmark it you know on the market in general can be utilized by operators specifically to stay competitive and what kind of insights they can take away from you know from these you know benchmarks and how they can implement them in the strategies essentially so two things the most obvious and and where we get a lot of the requests are when entering a new market so you know say you've got a tool like blast score or something similar where you know okay I'm going into this market these are the top five the top 10 people if I tell you in just kind of a siloed imagery this game takes 12 seconds to load and your registration process took 30 seconds and that's all very interesting numbers but those numbers on their own don't mean that much if you are able to have somebody in the market that can look at these top five or 10 competitors and then show where you are at that is very very interesting because the question is what does this market look like what is competitive what is like the good experience and then how do you stack up are you ahead are you behind what's the delta between all these things so I think that's kind of the key in where we come in for entering a new market it's you know take a look at these top guys by GGR by brand recognition whatever how fast do they load how seamless are these processes what kind of games promotions payment channels whatever do they have and that's kind of the work we did historically and what launched test is that we would always start with the data we would start saying this is how things are today with time this gap should close and you should surpass things we had you know some of our largest clients say this is who we're targeting we want to be on track with them so that's that's kind of the thinking and I mean aside from new markets I think what people often forget is once you've gained share in a market are you keeping an eye on it are you making sure nobody else is coming up on your heels who has come in and what kind of product are they offering so that's also key it's taking a look at you know who's gaining share and how do they stack up against you so test it doesn't do kind of really large macro market research but what we can do is we can say okay you know what's important and where you're going and what you're investing and who you're competing with now how do you stack up against those people right we can't necessarily solve the issues either when possible we can you know give comments and insights because we know I gaming so well but the key is we can say this is you know where you want to be this is where you are these are the gaps between them this is all based on real people with real phones real computers you know in the target market trying your products out so that's our goal this is a major issue especially in the young markets where you know one operator whether it's local or you know like from somewhere from Europe entered these markets like 10 years ago you know had this like a huge market share and then you know new market entrance entering you know buying like a small small chunks and then the bigger chunks of your market shares and like as you said you know like you really need to understand what these guys are doing in terms of you know the products they're like approaches the speed of law to like speed of withdrawal like as you mentioned because I think you know essentially that the speed of withdrawal like as you mentioned could be one of the most like all-time most important factors you know within like any operator it within any market so I'm really happy to have you here Kyle I think the insights you mentioned are really important for operators and even like as we discovered any other you know like companies in night gaming to be considered and while performing their work in a certain markets so thank you so much for all these insights you shared it was really a pleasure to have you here. Like Mr. Mature thanks so much for having me on. [ Silence ]
