Newly launched in New Jersey, the game developer is putting twists on iCasino slot mechanics.

Pallavi Deshmukh was at a pivot point in her career in 2018. She’d been working in the gaming space for 15 years, and after spending most of that time employed by giant corporations, she was getting the itch to try something smaller.

But maybe not quite as small as what was presented to her.

An investor with a pure startup in the online casino game development space, someone she’d known for a few years, reached out and asked Deshmukh if she would help him build this business from scratch, as its CEO.

“It was quite daunting,” Deshmukh recalled. “When he asked me, I was like, ‘No, I’m not prepared for this.’ But he asked me to just think about it. And I took some time, I evaluated where I was at that point in time in my life. I didn’t have any dependents. I discussed it with my now-husband. I discussed it with my dad. I asked, ‘What do you guys think? This could be an exciting opportunity.’ And both of them said, ‘Go for it. What’s stopping you? Worst-case scenario, you can always go back and look for another job.’”

Six years later, Deshmukh remains the CEO of NetGaming, which just launched Friday in its second state, New Jersey. And she’s definitely not second-guessing the gamble she took.

“I don’t think I need to look for another job anytime soon,” she told Casino Reports.

Coming to America

Things move quickly in the digital gaming industry, and U.K.-based NetGaming’s path has taken it from conception in 2018, to launch in 2021, to arrival in the U.S. via partnership with BetMGM in Michigan in 2023, to its current state — 36 employees and growing, with a presence in two U.S. states in addition to numerous international markets.

“To begin with, we were not necessarily planning to enter the U.S. market, because it’s such a difficult market to enter,” Deshmukh said. “It’s expensive, barriers to entry are quite high, relatively speaking, compared to outside of the U.S. So it wasn’t something that we were looking to do immediately.

“But we were having these discussions with BetMGM, this was in late-2020, early-2021, and they said, listen, we need content here. At that point in time, there weren’t as many suppliers in the market as there are now. So that was the trigger point. We started focusing on getting the entity registered, starting the licensing process, having the technical submissions in place. That’s how it started, and now it is a big part of our strategy. The U.S. is one of the biggest markets and growing really fast for us.”

As everyone in the industry in the U.S. knows, there are far more states that regulate sports betting than online casino. But for a company like NetGaming, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As they expand slowly from state to state, the landscape for iCasino is less daunting than if they were trying to join the sports betting party right now.

“And hopefully,” Deshmukh said, “by the time we catch up on all the iGaming states, there will be more coming along.”

Pallavi’s path

After graduating business school in 2003 with a masters in marketing and finance and getting a job in insurance, Deshmukh’s career in the gaming sphere began that October with PartyGaming, the company behind the largest online poker site in the world at the time, PartyPoker. Her cousin worked in Party’s HR department and suggested Deshmukh apply for one of their sales and marketing jobs based in India.

PartyCasino was part of the portfolio back then, but poker was the company’s primary focus, and Deshmukh’s role had her managing affiliates — companies that helped bring players to the site. She moved to London a few years into the job and became head of poker affiliate relations, but by 2011, Deshmukh found herself getting bored with the affiliate side of the business.

So she shifted gears, while remaining with bwin/Party, and started managing B2B partners.

“The company had just started this whole B2B unit,” she recalled, “and they wanted to grow the unit and make sure that they were getting ready for U.S. market entry, because they knew if and when U.S. happens, it is going to be largely B2B-based. They knew it would be about partnering up with land-based casinos, hooking up to their licenses.

“And I thought it was quite an interesting new thing to work on. I could apply what I’d already learned, and I got to meet customers who were with these large-scale organizations.”

She worked with partners in Denmark and France — who had monopolies in those regulated markets — and then, in 2013 …

“New Jersey happened,” Deshmukh said simply.

It was B2B combined with B2C, and she eventually moved to Jersey City in 2015, taking frequent trips to the Borgata in Atlantic City, the casino that partnered with PartyGaming in the Garden State.

“It was a great experience,” Deshmukh recalled. “We were focused on the digital side, but I got to know a lot more about how land-based operations work and the scale of those operations.”

Game for a pivot

After 13 years with PartyGaming, finally Deshmukh decided it was time to head elsewhere in 2016. She moved to Malta and became senior account manager for NetEnt, a major casino game developer. She managed three accounts for them: PokerStars, Unibet, and LeoVegas.

And in 2018, with two years’ experience working for a game developer under her belt, she made a “Net-Net” move when that investor who was starting up NetGaming (who chooses publicly to remain anonymous) came calling.

NetGaming’s plan was to build its entire platform in-house, from scratch. “We did not want to outsource,” Deshmukh reflected. “We knew we had the capability in house, the team was there. We didn’t want to be dependent on a third party. When it comes to outsourcing, it can get tricky as you grow.”

In parallel with creating games, the small NetGaming team started applying for licenses and getting their games certified, and in 2021, they launched with a modest portfolio of about 15 games.

“That’s what we had, and we didn’t want to rush and start cloning games. It was a conscious decision to start with a smaller portfolio and then build gradually.”

A tour of the website now reveals 48 game titles, some of them familiar style slots … and some of them a bit outside the norm.

New ways to slot

The most popular NetGaming title, according to Deshmukh, is a Halloween-themed game called Wicked Wins Fortune Pick, which has a unique mechanic that makes the player feel as though they have more agency than with a typical slot where all you do is click the “spin reels” button.

The player has a 3×5 grid of jack-o-lanterns on the screen, each with an assigned dollar value — a cost to pick that pumpkin. The player clicks on a pumpkin of their choosing, and underneath, a prize (or no prize) is revealed. The results are all based on random number generators, and sometimes the prize is less than the amount paid, and sometimes it’s more. Sometimes a $5 pumpkin pays $50; sometimes a $1 pumpkin pays 60 cents.

And sometimes the pumpkins produce coins that go into bonus pots, where if you collect enough coins, you initiate a bonus round.

“I think the simplicity of the game is a key to the way it’s caught on,” Deshmukh said. “It’s very straightforward to understand. You don’t have to worry about pay tables. You don’t have to worry about line combinations. You don’t need to worry about, ‘Oh, is the symbol adjacent to this?’ It’s so simple, you just tap on it, it reveals the value, and that’s it. And the bonuses are also quite unique and exciting. They’re all multiplier-based. So I think the popularity is a combination of a couple of things.”

Seeing the success of the pick mechanic, NetGaming has expanded its line to include a similar sports-themed game, Football Glory Fortune Pick. (Or Soccer Glory Fortune Pick, depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on.)

Another game from NetGaming that plays nothing like most of the slots you’re used to is called Winfinitum Reels. It’s a rare single-line slot, 1×3, where the player spins for a number, a mathematical symbol, and another number. If one of the positions is a blank space, the bet returns zero. But it could come out “2 x 2,” and pay out four times the bet. Or “10 + 3” and pay out 13 times the bet. Or “2 . 1” and pay 2.1 times the bet. And so forth.

You may think you’ve seen simplicity in a slot game before, but you’ve never seen simplicity like this.

“When we started our journey,” Deshmukh said, “we were trying to focus a bit more on unique themes — just from a concept and art point of view. But then as we were generating more and more data and analyzing, we started seeing patterns that helped us to see how we wanted to change our product strategy. We wanted to do something that is resonating not just with the operators, but with the players. So one of the things we focused on was to plug holes in our portfolio, having specific mechanics that we know players like.”

The road ahead

More than 20 years into a career that has taken her from India, to London, to Malta, and to good ol’ Jersey City, what does CEO Deshmukh see in the future of NetGaming?

“Looking at the U.S. specifically, I feel like we got in at just the right time, and it’s only going to grow,” she said. “I mean, it’ll be great if we have a couple more states legalize iGaming, especially New York. If something happens in 2025, fingers crossed, then that’s definitely something that we look forward to.

“We started small, and we started with just a couple of games, and now we are building more and we want to continue that. For 2025, we’ve already started working on a few other kinds of mechanics and kinds of game themes that are going to be, again, quite different from traditional slots.

“Slots will always be our bread and butter, but finding that twist, that’s what we’re aiming for.”

The only twist she can’t imagine is another career pivot, to another company. If life is a game of Wicked Wins Fortune Pick, Deshmukh is happy with what she found under the last pumpkin she picked.

Article originally published on: CasinoReports.com