Meet: Alexandre Tomic

Alexandre Tomic is the CO-founder of one of our partners; Slotsmillion. Therefore we would like to provide you with this interview of him. Also, in the end, you will find the small chat we had with him on Malta. This will give you a chance to see how it works in a gaming company, not only as a player. Enjoy!
 
 
 

• Introduce yourself and your role in Slotsmillion/ALEA.com

My name is Alexandre Tomic and I am the co-founder and CEO of ALEA.com and SlotsMillion.com. I started out in the igaming industry twelve years ago, when I became an affiliate along with ALEA.com’s other co-founder Charles Gross. Our philosophy for our affiliate website Casino Lemonade was to include all games as free games from all software providers inside an affiliate website, and from there the idea of becoming an operator and having our own platform started to take hold. Four years ago we founded ALEA.com, and SlotsMillion developed from there.
 

• How did you come up with the idea of providing a VR online casino?

In October 2014, we discovered Digital Cybercherries’ New Retro Arcade game, which uses a virtual reality environment to emulate old Nintendo video games, and were inspired to think about doing the same with slot games. It seemed to us that without being able to play in a real casino with other people and see them winning, the atmosphere is not the same – it lacks that buzz; that electricity. It’s not immersive enough – not social enough. Online casinos just don’t facilitate that kind of thrill, so when the concept of a virtual reality casino first occurred to us we started to see a solution to that problem. It combined the convenience of an online casino with the social aspect of a real casino. Unfortunately the project with Digital Cybercherries fell through, but when we discovered Lucky VR, who had been working on a blackjack virtual reality demo game, we continued from there.
We have recently released an updated version of the VR casino, including a TV screen upon which the Cash Game Festival in Malta was broadcasted to those at the iGaming Super Show in Amsterdam, and are planning to release another version soon where players will be able to see each other’s wins displayed onscreen, as well as offering players new avatars and more information about the games.
 

• Tell us about the technique behind it.

At the moment, we have taken an assortment of 40 slots from our online site – the ones we thought would work best – and inserted them into a virtual casing within the VR casino. Though the environment is 3D and VR, the games themselves are still 2D. In the future, however, we would like to to develop fully immersive VR slots, where the player is inside the slot, totally engaged in its universe. Slots could be laid out in layers, which would create more of a feeling of depth and make the experience much more realistic. In a slot like ‘Gonzo’s Quest’, for example, the reels could be displayed on a wall in front of the player, who would find themselves in the middle of the slot’s scenery and imagery. The main 3D animated character, Gonzo, as well as some of the symbols, could be moving around the player, surrounding them with the universe of the slot and making it a fully immersive experience.
 

• What is your intention in the future?

We are currently looking to expand into several new markets, including the UK, Portugal, Denmark and Romania. We are hoping to have the UK license by the end of the year, and once we have it, we are planning to create a new VR casino with a lot of exciting new features, which should hopefully be live in February next year. By then the VR consumer base should be starting to increase, and we would like to be able to address the UK market with our new VR casino.
We are proud to have a very large portfolio of games – as it stands right now, we have over 1200 slots, from approximately 25 software providers. However, there are some very important providers whose games we have not yet integrated into our site, such as Novomatic, Scientific Games (WMS, Bally, ShuffleMaster, Barcrest, etc…), and IGT for example, and we are hoping to finalise the situation with these providers as soon as possible – preferably before the end of the year.
 

• What will the customers get from you as a player with yours?

We like to think we have a lot to offer players at SlotsMillion. Firstly, as previously mentioned, the variety of slots that we have – and to make it easier for users to find the games they want, we have also developed a filter which allows players to sort games in terms of theme, software providers, paylines, features and type of slot. We are planning to update the filter by releasing a new version in the near future, which will allow users to sort games according to more precise features, such as types of wilds or an autospin feature.
We are also working on a recommendation engine, which will hopefully be released by the end of the year. Using this engine, our aim is to be able to recommend games to players via more advanced methods, such as the max bet and win, the hit frequency, the way the slot returns the money, and the slot variance, which we consider to be the real core of gambling.
Perhaps most obviously, the main element that SlotsMillion alone can offer to players is the VR casino. Our goal is to make sure our players truly have the best possible experience when they play with us, and that drives us to keep working to develop new innovations so that we can stay at the forefront of the industry.
 

• Will you attend Bulgaria yourself?

No, unfortunately I won’t be able to make it this time, but I’m looking forward to seeing how Maret Komarova, who we’re sponsoring, gets on, and also to attending other events in the future.