Up until 2014, hardly anyone had ever heard of Amaya, a relatively unknown Canadian gaming software company. The company itself has been around since 2004, getting its start by offering business to business technological solutions for the gaming industry.
There’s a lot that goes on in the back end of gaming businesses, things that are essential for its operation. For instance there’s much more to offering casino games online then just the website and the casino games, and there’s a host of other software programs and solutions that are needed to have these operations running smoothly and successfully.
The same is true for other gaming providers, such as land based ones and even governments running lotteries. So this is where Amaya started to shine, being well known among companies offering gaming but virtually unknown among the public as this software isn’t end user.
So Amaya would design and lease this software to gaming companies, who then used it to further their gaming businesses. Amaya did carve out a nice niche in this area and over the years the company grew in both reputation and revenue.
In 2006 they brought David Baazov on board as CEO, considered one of the brightest minds in the casino industry, although no one could have anticipated the feats he would pull off in the next few years.
The company went public in 2010, which further fueled Amaya’s growth, and the next year, in 2011, they made their first major acquisition by buying gaming software maker Cryptologic.
Cryptologic was at the time not the most technologically advanced software company, but they were much better known in the industry than Amaya was, and at the time a lot of people were wondering who this small company really was that could go out there and buy an established competitor like this who was in many ways bigger than they were.
Amaya Slot Games
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Amaya Really Takes Off
The skill of negotiation was the real talent of Baazov and Amaya though and things were just getting started for them. Owning Cryptologic granted them to gain a much firmer foothold in the online gaming business, now finally producing innovative end user applications, software players could enjoy. The journey was only just beginning for them.
More acquisitions quickly ensued, enhancing their casino software holdings as well as breaking more into the online poker industry by purchasing the Ongame Poker Network from online gaming powerhouse bwin.party. The company had very ambitious plans.
Their purchasing of larger software companies certainly attracted some attention, and acquiring a poker network from a gaming giant attracted even more, but this was insignificant compared to their subsequent deal.
By 2014, Amaya had increased its company valuation to $177 million, an impressive metric, but still a very modest figure, and at this juncture hardly anyone had ever heard of them. Soon they acquired the Rational Group, parent company of PokerStars, for $4.9 billion, instantly propelling them to be the largest online gaming company in the world. This certainly opened new opportunities for them.
This was an achievement that was even hard to visualize being possible but is testament to how efficiently this company is able to arrange funds for purchases, and it was not only truly impressive in the gaming industry, it was one of the most extraordinary deals ever in the chronicle of business.
Cryptologic’s consumer division, WagerLogic, ended up being sold during this period to raise additional funds, for $70 million, about double what it paid for the entire firm two years earlier, turning a neat profit as well as maintaining a considerable portion of the original resources of the company. Finance was a major focus too.
Amaya Is A Major Player In The Gaming Software Business Now
So Amaya is indeed a company that understands the strategy of the deal, and they have executed some truly remarkable accomplishments so far in their relatively brief history. Despite selling WagerLogic, Amaya presently has quite a collection of consumer gaming software, including myriad games that are utilized by online casinos globally.
The acquisition of PokerStars has definitely launched them to the biggest of stages and they are now extremely well known. Among their software assets is the company that developed the PokerStars poker application, which is now part of their division Amaya Software Services.
Amaya Software Services oversees all of the gaming software of the firm, including their poker, casino, and sports betting software programs. In terms of user engagement, nothing comes even close to their poker software, with half a million players engaging with it on average at any given moment, which simply eclipses their casino and sports betting software usage as well as anyone else’s for that matter. Innovation is at the forefront.
Amaya has been carving out a distinct niche though in the casino game software domain, and although they aren’t up to competing with the largest casino software producers yet, they are getting more and more popular all the time, and with this firm, who can predict how far they might advance.
Historically, it was more challenging for smaller casino software firms to break into the sector because most bigger online casinos would have licensing deals with one of the major software producers to provide exclusive offerings.
This is shifting though and today you see many online casinos utilize multiple suppliers, to offer their clients a more varied choice of games, not volume of games as much as variety of them.
So this has enabled Amaya and other more moderately sized casino software firms to make some serious inroads and the industry is much more open now. Amaya has indeed made quite an influence lately and offers many licensed games, including hero-themed ones, as well as games from other software producers such as Aristocrat, where they have leased the software used in their land based casino games and rebranded them as Amaya games for their usage online. The company's influence is only growing.
Amaya continues to sustain its diversity of offerings though and are still heavily engaged in the business to business side of things, as they have been consistently, but even more so now that they are so renowned and acclaimed as a company, and this is a company whose vision or hunger for expansion and success knows no limits, so just because they are the largest online gaming company in the world now doesn’t imply that they will be slowing down anytime soon.