Game On

Photo by Niklas Palmklint

When you walk into the Bonnier Gaming office in Stockholm, the first thing that you see is a black and white poster of Jimi Hendrix. The rock legend revolutionized music with his skill, his anarchic approach and his embrace of new technology. All three things could also be considered success factors for Bonnier Gaming.

Games aren't new to Bonnier. From the late 1930s until the mid-1980s, then-Bonnier-owned gaming company Alga had the rights to such classic games as Monopoly and Risk. Bonnier Gaming, though, deals with a different beast altogether—online gaming.

"Simply put, you could say that we are dealing with three types of games: casual gaming, lotteries and betting," says company president Marcus Forsell.

Bonnier Gaming offers 1,400 games and has a quarter of a million registered players. Their first platform in casual gaming was for Finnish MTV3's Web site. But more collaborations are in the pipeline.

"We are not game developers," stresses Adam Schaub, Director of Casual Gaming. "We market the game and focus on 'lunch break market', which means that we focus on people who want to play shorter sessions and want to have games that are easy to learn. The definition of game in this sector is to be able to learn the rules in 30 seconds."

Casual gaming is one of the fastest growing sectors of the gambling industry—in the U.S., it is a multimillion dollar industry. And more than half of all casual players are women.

The TV show Bingolotto's site, Bingolotto.se, is a spin-off of several different lottery games online—and one of Bonnier Gaming's biggest successes so far. In 2009, they plan to launch two new lottery sites, their own brand Spirr and the Spanish site Bingolé.

The third arm of their business model, betting, is still in the conception stage.

"Betting is fun!" says Marcus Forsell. "It is intellectually challenging and reminiscent of the trading on the stock exchange. But so far we are only looking at different opportunities. "

Bonnier Gaming is still a small upstart, but it has big potential. Today's ten employees may well have tripled by this time next year, and what will happen then is written in the stars. Or, as Jimi Hendrix might have said, "Excuse me while I kiss the sky."