Interview with Tomas Tezak, the market readiness and logistics lead at Neon Valley Studios

Welcome! It's a pleasure to have you in SlotCatalog's interview series. Please, introduce yourself to our readers.

Hello. I'm Tomas Tezak, the market readiness and logistics lead at Neon Valley Studios.

What's the studio's vision going forward?

We're here to provide innovative and fresh online gaming content that always gives a great experience to the player.

How do you incorporate this vision into your corporate culture?

We're based out of Las Vegas, so we live and breathe casino gaming. We are exposed to casinos as soon as we step outside the front door, so we consider the entire team to be subject matter experts — in fact, we rely on and encourage every team member to input into any area of a game, from game mechanics to engaging themes. At every stage of production, we're looking for those fresh ideas and that first vision from across all areas of the team. That's an important part of what we do and how we do it.

You have an exclusive partnership with Microgaming. What are the main benefits and perks of such a deal?

Microgaming's a huge player in this industry, so their leadership and guidance are very valuable to us, along with having access to people who are very familiar with the markets. We rely on them for feedback on our games and work very closely with the publishing team, which is a great advantage for a young studio like us. Having backup from a company like Microgaming is a huge asset.

Neon Valley has been on the market for a couple of years only, but your releases achieve truly impressive results according to their SlotRank. Why do you think they were received so well by players?

That's a good question. I think it's because we are players everyone in this company is an actual slot player from Vegas and we've been exposed to it from the beginning. Therefore, everything we do is with the player in mind. If it's not fun for us it won't be fun for the player. We take that to heart and to every game that we build.

What makes you extra proud about your games?

Every game has a different element that makes us proud. We try to do something different each time, but the main thing is that we do everything in-house. Everything we build is built from the ground up. All our ideas, sound, art, development... That’s just us. When we release a game, we have the sense of pride of not just releasing something, but something that's doing well in the market. Seeing our creations perform well is an added bonus to it.

What is your favorite slot released so far and why is that?

It's hard to say because I've worked on every game that we've released and they're all special in some way. In terms of playing as a player, I do enjoy the both Augustus and Age of Conquest - that mechanic with the collection and the wild reels is something I keep coming back to and keep playing, but every game has an element of pride because it has something different.

What can you tell us about “Queen of Alexandria”?

That was a great effort. The second game we released was Atlantean Treasures, which featured the Mega Moolah progressive jackpot, but we wanted to follow that one up with a WowPot theme. We grabbed similar mechanics from Atlantean Treasures and turned that into Queen of Alexandria. We wanted to explore an Egyptian theme, so we felt the Cleopatra theme worked well (coming from Vegas, that's a very, very familiar theme to us). We wrote that up and also released a static version of it, so we could give players the ability to play both a progressive and static jackpot. It was a great project from beginning to end; the arc was stunning, everything was done in-house, and it's great to see it do so well!

Could you give us a hint of what's coming next on the roadmap?

We have a lot of good ideas on the roadmap. We always have about two years’ worth of content already in the works one way or the other, but we try to keep those a little bit close to our chest. What I can tell you about is that we have a game coming up for the winter season featuring an exciting fantasy theme built on the Link&Win™ mechanic. We’ll reveal more as the weeks go by.

Talking about features and gameplay mechanics, what can we expect in Neon Valley's upcoming releases?

We are always looking at what's working well both in iGaming and also with land-based games. We're in Vegas and we're very close to the casinos, so we keep an eye on which new mechanics are working out there and trying to adapt them into our games. We're working now with the Link&Win mechanics so you can probably expect some more games with that feature, plus some new surprises that we have coming up.

Are there any trends in the iGaming sector you find interesting and what are your predictions for the future of our industry?

What I'm seeing is new markets opening up in different places or changing regulations. As you see these new markets emerging and with new regulations, I think tailoring content to each market and to each type of player is going to be key. The more flexible we can be and the more we can adapt our games to a specific player segment or specific market, then the more successful we will be and the more we will be able to reach players across the globe. I do believe that as the markets start to show their own requirements, we'll see more players across the globe with maybe slightly more fragmentation. It will come down to how well we can tailor experiences to players in multiple markets. The fact is that the markets are evolving, and we need to be flexible and adapt our content to react to that.

Before we wrap this up, are there any final words you would like to add?

I really just want to thank SlotCatalog for having us. We're definitely big fans and we do follow the site's content consistently to see what's working out there. We're very happy to be featured.