We sat down with Johan Persson from Just For The Win to find out more about the studio and its approach to game development. They talk about their approach to games and why that makes them stand out from the crowd.
Q&A
Please introduce yourselves – what games are you known for?
I'm Johan Persson, co-founder of Just For The Win.
I think that what we're most known for is our first game from May 2017, Goldwyn's Fairies. Then in January of 2018 we had a very big hit with a very popular game, Deco Diamonds.
Who might we know in your team?
We have co-founder, Jay Sopp, who's been with Electronic Arts and in the gambling industry was with NetEnt for many years, so is a very well-known person in the industry. We are now at roughly 50 people.
What is your studio’s approach to game development?
Well, we started off as a Scandinavian-style slot maker but we're transitioning into where we look at the market, try to interpret what will be the next trend and position ourselves so that our games will be the top picks.
At the same time, we use something called MDA, which is Mechanic, Dynamics and Aesthetics.
So we find a suitable mechanic, design around that and then we put on the aesthetics of the game. It's a different process and it works very well.
What do you think you do that’s different from other developers?
We're not that much different from every developer; we all have the same common goal, which is to make the best, most fun and commercially successful game out there.
The unique thing about us is our team - no other company has that. We are very talented people, and everyone is talented in their way. I mean… we have a math guy who is insane when it comes to calculating math, and I can barely do plus and minus (and I'm also the CFO of the company, which makes it very weird!).
So we are a lot of talented people. We all put our heads together and out come great games. We're normal people; we have the same goals as everyone else.
The backbone in our company is Swedish (even though we now have 20 different nationalities here) but the backbone and the culture of the company is Swedish; we never want to walk the red carpet and show ourselves and be like 'those guys'.
We are more 'behind the scenes, doing our thing'. We focus on that; we don't parade with it.
What are you working on currently?
The 2021 roadmap is 12 fantastic games.
They're actually very good; we had to choose between all of the prototypes that had been made, and it's the strongest year so far for us. It's also our fifth year in operation; we turned five on April 20th.
This year we have two major jackpots: we have the Mega Moolah Jackpot and we have the Wowpot, which are both now live: Juicy Joker Jackpot, Mega Moolah and Sherlock & Moriarty Wowpot - which we had the win on during the first day of release!
What can we expect from you for the rest of 2021?
As a company we're pretty set. We are going to focus all of our energy on maintaining a great roadmap that the operators will know and love… and build our brand.