Lukasz Twardowski, Owner, Use It Better

Lukasz is the owner of Use It Better, the company that won the GiGse 2012 LaunchPad. In this interview, he tells us about his plans for EiG and how he will take the company forward.

Firstly, can you outline how Use It Better works and how you came up with the business idea for the product.

The easiest way to explain how Use It Better works is to say that it’s a “CCTV for online games”. Just like cameras in land-based casinos, Use It Better enables game developers to watch people playing their online games in order to better monetise them or to eliminate cheaters from the game. I like to say that it’s “CCTV on steroids” because our technology has a serious advantage over its source of inspiration - we’ve made it possible to easily search inside the recordings and even compare them to build behavioural patterns of people who are churning, spending money or cheating. Having this knowledge about your players can really make a difference in growing your gaming business.

What made you develop the software and why did you put it to use in the gaming industry?

Online gaming is great because it allows you to easily engage people where they are - at home or, often, at work. But the problem is that this direct relationship that you had with players at casinos is lost in online space. You don’t meet your players and you don’t know what they enjoy any more. All you see is just the results of their actions. We’ve been making online games and advertising for years and we have realized that the more important question than “how much money people spend?” is “what makes them spend?”. Then we thought that the best way to answer this question would be to actually watch how they do it.  The idea that we can use the very same service to identify cheaters came much later but it made perfect sense. There’s huge market need for this and our results in this domain are more than promising.

What made you feel that it had the potential to win the Launchpad?

Gaming industry becomes more and more competitive. User acquisition costs are huge and profit margins become lower. The only way to growth leads through optimization - user experience, marketing costs, fraud related losses. It makes a great opportunity for service providers like us.

How did it feel to win the LaunchPad? What were you expecting from it?

It was an amazing experience. I can’t imagine a better validation of our service in iGaming space than winning both the audience and judges’ vote. LaunchPad has already opened some doors for us and gave us confidence to enter them. 

What do you plan on doing with your idea now you’ve won?

The next two or three months will be extremely important for our business. Winning Launchpad seems like just the beginning when compared to upcoming challenges: raising money, launching sales, convincing customers to pay for our products and finally deliver them real value.

How do you think gaming will benefit from Use It Better?

We hope to keep three promises. Thanks to Use It Better games will be more fun to play, games will be safer to play and last but not least, games will make more money as a result of better gaming experience.

You’ll be at EiG: who do you hope to meet and what are you looking forward to most at the event?

Use It Better products will be fully validated by October and our goal for EiG will be obvious: acquire new customers and partners. I think there is no other event with more decision-makers gathered in one place for three days than EiG. If an asteroid would hit Barcelona during the show, the industry would probably vanish!

What advice would you give to anyone entering the Launchpad for next year?

The convergence of free-to-play and real-money gaming makes it an exciting time. Online gambling operators are thinking hard how to reach social and casual players while at the same time developers like Zynga are dreaming about converting their players into gamblers. On top of it there’s Facebook, which probably doesn’t really care what kind of player is paying as long as they are taking 30% revenue share. The next year will bring a lot of opportunities and Launchpad can get you in front of the most important people in the industry at the very best moment.

For more information on the upcoming EiG event on 14-16 Oct, please go to www.eigexpo.com