Josh Green, co-founder of DreamSpin, sat down with Nigel Hall of DemoSlot, to talk about DreamSpin and how we feel we can stand out in this industry.
Hi Josh, thanks for speaking with us today! Can you tell us some more about how the idea for DreamSpin came about?
Certainly, thanks for having me. The idea came slowly, in conversations with my co-founders, Will Barnes and Jamie Rosen, who co-founded Hideous Slots and Fruity Slots, respectively.
Having already merged Fruity Slots and Hideous Slots into one more streamlined business, we were in talks about how to move things forward. We toyed with a few different ideas, but ultimately, we all decided that we thought the time was right to move into the slot development space.
We felt we had enough experience at that point with the industry, and we had worked closely alongside providers through our affiliate business. So, although we knew there would be a big learning curve, it felt like things had aligned well, and it was now or never.
Your first game, Buzz Thrill, was quite a unique take on a classic theme. Is this something you set out to do from the beginning?
We were sure that we wanted to enter the space with something quite distinctive, and we landed on, as you say, a unique take on a classic theme.
We decided on outer space quite quickly, knowing it’s a theme that you can have a lot of fun with in terms of audiovisuals. After some amusing conversations and having a closer look at our reel setup, we decided we’d send some bumblebees to outer space.
It was quite well received overall, especially when we allowed members of our community to name our bees in a social media campaign.
What part of your experience in Fruity Slots and Hideous Slots do you think was most transferable to DreamSpin?
Definitely our experience with slots, the community we had built up, and the opinions they shared with us. You can learn a lot over the years about casinos and compliance, but having worked alongside existing studios to gather feedback for them, and in turn having access to the opinions of tens of thousands of players, was invaluable to us.
When we came to build Buzz Thrill, and even today as we move forward with our roadmap, we’re often thinking back to this feedback we’ve been given from real-life players, especially the opinions we’ve been surprised by in the past.
What sets DreamSpin apart in such a competitive space?
I think our history. A lot of studios are founded by people who come from game design or software engineering, but DreamSpin followed years spent as players, reviewers, content creators, and affiliate partners.
We’ve seen this industry from multiple angles, and I think this gives us a unique perspective. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, but we are trying to use this unique perspective to produce refined releases that players will love.
Can you tell us any more about your upcoming roadmap?
We have a few different releases in production right now, including our next title, Backstreet Wilds.
This is quite similar to Buzz Thrill in that we took a fairly common theme and put our own twist on it (in this case the classic fruit theme with an urban twist) but totally different in mechanics and features.
After Backstreet Wilds, we have some fun releases coming with a variety of features, including cluster pays, scatter pays, and hold & win features.
We’re keen to have a varied roadmap that showcases a lot of different mechanics and themes, but we’re paying close attention to any obvious trends emerging and what features most suit the casinos and markets we’re working within.
Is there anything coming from DreamSpin that you’re really excited about?
Each of us has our own favourites, but for me, I’m really excited about our first release coming through the Yggdrasil Masters program, our take on a scatter pays release with increasing multipliers.
Of course, we’re throwing in a few extra features to make it our own, but this is probably the one that I’m personally most excited about.