Boom Entertainment: building the next generation of sports gaming and casino products

Image source: Boom Entertainment

Boom Entertainment made the headlines this week thanks to new investment in the firm by Rush Street Interactive. CEO Steve Murphy took time out to talk in more detail about the business and its vision for the future.

Can you give our readers a brief introduction to the Boom Entertainment brand and explain more about what you do?

At Boom Entertainment (formerly Boom Sports), we are building the next generation of sports gaming and casino products. We specialize in building gaming experiences that millions of consumers love, with incredible, fast technology. We’re most well-known for our successful free-to-play platform and products (including NBC Sports Predictor, which has been downloaded by nearly 2 million Americans), but we’re also building a suite of innovative casino content and sports betting games that we believe will make a huge impact on the industry.

We work with media companies, pro sports leagues, retail brands, and casinos. For media companies and leagues, we help them better engage their audience, increase viewership, and build digital gaming assets for betting partners. For casinos, we built them premium games that will drive revenue.

Some of our partners include NBC Sports, Penn National Gaming/Barstool Sports, YES (the Yankees network), Madison Square Garden Network, Tim Hortons, Golf.com, and several others that will launch later this year. We also have a number of relationships with leading casinos and sportsbooks in the US that will debut our casino games in the coming months.

You’ve been cited as aiming to launch sportsbooks in ‘second wave’ states. Is that still the case and what’s the rationale behind that strategy?

Boom views itself as a premier supplier of technology, games, and services in the online gaming industry. As a scaling tech startup, you entertain a number of different paths as you grow and we briefly considered launching our own direct-to-consumer sportsbook and casino. However, we’ve had such amazing traction and growth on the B2B side that we have parked those ambitions for the time being and are solely focused on fueling our partners’ success.

As part of that vision, we expect to build some incredible real-money sports betting products and games and some very innovative casino content. We may even build out the full experience of a partner’s sportsbook at some point. We are confident we can build a highly differentiated and successful sportsbook and casino experience, but we are going to build those experiences as a B2B company.

Looking more specifically at Boom’s product offer, how does it differ from the competition and can you tell us more about the igaming aspect of the business?

We are going to launch a suite of sports betting games and products that will make sports betting more fun for a larger swath of the general public. We are building experiences both for the mass-casual market to introduce millions of new people to betting, as well as serious gaming products that will allow a more immersed, diehard fan to enjoy new ways to experience their favorite sports.

We believe sports betting will eventually go the way of slots, where over time there was a ton of innovation and differentiation of features to create more compelling entertainment. And we are putting together a team led by Chris Fargis (former DraftKings director of sportsbook) to do it.

On the slots/casino side, we’ve recruited some of the most legendary creative figures in the industry (Thom Ang, Joseph Masci), individuals who have built not only a large quantity of games (hundreds of casino games for IGT, Aristocrat, High 5 Games), but also many of the very highest performing titles in the industry. We will be a force in this space.

And lastly, on the free-to-play side, we offer unparalleled technology and experiences. From a quality standpoint, no one comes close. We build high-end and high-touch experiences that simply drive better engagement, retention, and most importantly conversion to real-money products.

Finally, what can our readers expect to emerge from the Boom Entertainment pipeline in the coming months?

In the coming months, we will increase our product line with new free-to-play gaming products (which will include live streaming, marketplace technology, and deep sportsbook integrations) and will launch our first wave of innovative casino games to the market. We will continue to add incredible talent as we look to become the preeminent provider of technology and games for the industry.