Anton Backman, General Partner at Play Ventures – iGaming Interviews

Anton Backman, General Partner at Play Ventures – is an experienced venture capital investor focused on gaming, consumer technology, and emerging digital platforms. Based in Helsinki, he joined Play Ventures in 2019 and progressed from Investment Analyst and Venture Partner to Principal before becoming General Partner in 2023, where he leads investments across game studios, platforms, and technology. Earlier in his career, Backman co-founded Wave Ventures, a student-driven venture capital firm backed by founders of companies including Supercell and Skype, and served as its CEO and board member. He also gained early exposure to the startup ecosystem through Slush, where he helped manage investor operations and evaluated more than 1,000 companies, alongside experience in corporate law. In addition to his investment responsibilities at Play Ventures, Backman serves on the boards of companies including Midnite, Treasure Play, and Stellarplay Games, and as a board observer at Eloelo, giving him direct involvement with companies spanning gaming, entertainment, and consumer technology.

Play Ventures is a global early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2018 by former gaming entrepreneurs Henric Suuronen and Harri Manninen. The firm invests from pre-seed through Series A in game studios, gaming-inspired consumer applications, and the technology, artificial intelligence, infrastructure, payments, and services that support these businesses. Its investment strategy has expanded beyond traditional gaming to include “playable apps,” or consumer products that apply gaming principles such as engagement loops, virtual economies, personalization, and data-driven monetization. Play Ventures invests globally and currently manages five funds spanning vintages from 2018 through 2023, with a portfolio that includes companies across Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and other emerging markets.

Back in 2019, you were already writing about the engagement, retention, and monetisation mechanics behind successful free-to-play mobile games. What first convinced you that those same principles would eventually reshape online casino and sports betting?

I think for us at Play Ventures it started more actively around 2020 or 2021, when founders from our mobile free-to-play network started looking at real money opportunities, mainly skill games on mobile like Solitaire, Bingo, and Match Three, which were categories we knew well from the free-to-play side. That sort of pushed us to look more broadly at what was happening in real money gaming.

And then the demographic piece became hard to ignore. The emerging gambling audience had grown up playing mobile and social games, experiences that were never isolated single-player things, but something you did with other people. We started thinking that those players were going to bring pretty different expectations into real money gaming, and that the companies that understood that would have a better edge.

You’ve argued that many betting products still feel transactional compared with modern mobile games. Which mechanics from free-to-play gaming — such as progression, social features, or live operations — do you think have the greatest potential in real-money gaming?

The social layer is probably the most underdeveloped. When you play a slot, it’s a completely isolated experience with everybody running their own reel. There’s really no shared experience at all. What’s interesting is that F2P social casinos cracked this a long time ago. What really drives monetization there is that you’re in a virtual room with other players, there’s a chat, and you see what others are winning. Same core gameplay, same IP, just no real money outcomes. Two industries with the same DNA that barely speak.

Beyond the social piece, I think the bigger unlock longer term is what I’d call the metagame layer which includes progression mechanics, achievement systems, reasons to come back to the platform that aren’t just about placing your next bet. Things like guild systems or communal goals tied to season outcomes. These are very natural for products that are already team versus team at their core. Most of the industry hasn’t really gone there yet, but that’s where we think the next stage of differentiation happens.

You’ve pointed to crash games such as Aviator as an early example of this convergence. What does their success tell us about how much players value entertainment and shared experiences versus traditional factors such as return to player (RTP)?

I think Aviator proved two things. One is that social and multiplayer is a genuinely strong value proposition as you see the other players, when they drop off, and what they’re winning. It creates a kind of multiplayer experience out of what’s normally a single-player activity. It also leans heavily into the power of perceived skill. You choose when to cash out. Technically, you can’t really blame yourself if you didn’t jump out early enough and I think that sense of being in control of your destiny is a very powerful motivator that we’ll see more of in future formats.

On RTP specifically, crash games actually tend to have a lower house edge than slots, so that’s not quite the trade-off you’d expect. But if you look at something like DFS 2.0 or trading card platforms like Courtyard and Arena Club, those operate with lower RTPs than slot games and still attract very engaged audiences. That tells you pretty clearly that for a significant part of this emerging demographic, entertainment value matters more than the mathematical edge.

Play Ventures backed Midnite before this convergence became an obvious industry trend. What did you see in the founders or product early on that convinced you they could challenge much larger sportsbook and casino operators?

We invest very early and we’re very founder-led, so a big part of our conviction was around the founders themselves. These were two US guys building for the UK market, deliberately taking an outsider view into how a challenger brand could be built in a category that had largely grown up in one way. That kind of perspective is something we find compelling.

But I think where we found the most alignment was in our thinking around what mechanics from mobile gaming could actually be brought into real money gaming. When we got into that conversation, our thoughts converged pretty quickly. There were some early engagement metrics that looked promising through a mobile gaming lens, but a lot of our underwriting was around that shared mental model. They’ve had a phenomenal run since, landing in the top of the app store in the UK.

Large gambling operators have established brands, enormous customer bases, and substantial marketing budgets, while newer companies can often build on much more modern technology. Where do you think challengers have the strongest opportunity to outperform incumbents?

There’s no single silver bullet.  What we see with a company like Midnite is really just doing all the small things 1% better every day, and letting that compound. You’re going up against incumbents with 20-year-old tech platforms that aren’t as agile. That structural gap becomes very meaningful as product iteration speed diverges over time.

On marketing, the incumbents have largely relied on affiliate traffic. A challenger can bring the mobile gaming playbook including how to use social, mobile ad networks, AI-driven creative testing, being highly data-driven about what’s working and shipping rapid iteration. That’s been a meaningful part of how Midnite has grown, and it’s an area where legacy operators are lagging behind.

How significant will AI be in this next generation of iGaming? Where do you see it creating the biggest competitive advantage — whether in personalisation, live operations, marketing, risk management, or the underlying product itself?

In terms of what we’re already seeing in practice, AI-driven creative testing and data-driven marketing optimization is a clear early use case. Being able to rapidly iterate on creative using AI gives a modern operator a structural speed advantage over legacy competitors.

The second short-term shift I expect is AI’s impact on game development itself. Production cycles in RMG are already shortening, and the tooling is getting good enough that reskinning an existing title becomes close to trivial, with liveops content generation following not far behind. The constraint here, however, is the regulatory approval process for new games, which is not designed for a world where a studio can ship a new title every week. I think the winners will be the developers and operators who figure out how to publish new and personalized content rapidly within the regulatory frameworks rather than waiting for those frameworks to catch up. I’d also expect to see operators building far more original content in-house, moving beyond the usual suspects of crash and plinko variants.

If sportsbooks and casinos begin thinking more like free-to-play game companies, should they also measure success differently? Which gaming metrics translate well to real-money products, and which ones don’t?

This might sound blunt, but the biggest learning from free-to-play is to stop obsessing over keeping your CACs low and instead shift to a ROAS-focused mindset, where you’re equally focused on growing LTV over time. That’s what actually buys you an edge on the acquisition front, because a higher LTV lets you pay more for the same user than your competitors can. Over time, I’d also expect much sharper segmentation of users and looking at these metrics on a more granular level inside each cohort, with the aim to provide the best possible offer or promotion for each user. The RMG industry does this already, but mobile gaming is still a step ahead.

It’s hard to pinpoint metrics that matter for mobile F2P but not for RMG, aside from the odd ad revenue or ad engagement metric. But I can’t emphasise enough that in a world where attention is increasingly scarce, a strong ROAS is worth its weight in gold.

There is an obvious tension between using progression and retention mechanics to make gambling more engaging and ensuring responsible gaming. How should operators draw the line between creating a compelling product and encouraging unhealthy behaviour?

One thing I’d say is that the entertainment-first model could actually be a healthier framework by design. If players are going to a platform for the social experience, for the metagame, rather than to try to make money or chase a previous loss, that’s a more sustainable reason to spend time there. You don’t go for the expected value. You go because it’s genuinely an entertaining experience.

Prediction markets, sweepstakes, daily fantasy sports, and social betting are all experimenting outside the traditional sportsbook model. Which of these categories represent genuine product innovation, and which are primarily benefiting from differences in regulation?

Honestly, a lot of these platforms have so far largely built products similar to a traditional sportsbook, capitalizing on the same user motivations but in a way that amounts to regulatory arbitrage. We’re still in the early innings of what these platforms might grow into. And I think what the Kalshi/prediction market debate often forgets is what happened in Europe with Betfair, when a sophisticated market maker is on the other side of your trade, you could argue there’s still a house edge present, even if the regulatory framing says otherwise. I think Kalshi and Polymarket have a real fighting chance to spawn a completely new generation of predictions/betting products either on top or adjacent to their platforms, but so far the traction has unsurprisingly been in sports.

The sweepstakes side of things has taken a bit of a different direction. There wasn’t meaningful industry lobbying, and when the American Gaming Association pushed for a regulatory stance in California, the organized response was a little too late. Whereas Kalshi and the prediction market space have taken a much more proactive stance, which I think can yield genuinely important results compared to waiting for the regulator to come to you. Sweepstakes reminded everyone, however, of the strong demand for casino-style games and has in many ways paved the way for a new cohort of gaming products across skill games, card ripping platforms, and others.

Where I think a lot of the innovation still sits is the social layer like multiplayer systems, communal goals, and team-based progression. Most of these platforms are barely beyond group chats right now. The companies growing fastest haven’t had to prioritize it yet, but as the market stabilizes, that’s the next product agenda. And it’s worth noting that DraftKings and FanDuel have now launched prediction products of their own, and Robinhood has entered the space. The regulatory arbitrage window is narrowing, and the competitive advantage has to come from somewhere else

From a venture capital perspective, what do you look for when evaluating an iGaming startup, and which signals tell you a company has the potential to become a category leader rather than just another operator?

We’re a very founder-led fund. That means we invest very early, and a significant part of our conviction is around strong alignment between where the founder wants to take the company and where we think the market is going. That alignment matters more than a polished product at day one.

When we look at iGaming specifically, we apply a mobile gaming lens to the engagement metrics. We want to see signs that the product is retaining and engaging users in ways that go beyond the core transactional moment. Interestingly, we tend to find the most interesting founders coming from both RMG and adjacent industries rather than solely from the gambling space itself.  Ideally, you’re building a team where these two intersect. Having that adjacent experience allows you to think outside the box, take “naïve risk,” and do something daring such as building a challenger brand or pioneering a new type of gambling-adjacent category, while knowing the ins and outs of the player’s psyche will get you to scale and an eventual exit.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more about this VC fund should visit Play Ventures.