Quackers? 155.io bets on rubber duck racing
Live content studio 155.io has launched ducks.io – a real-world, 24/7 live racing game to, yes, bet on rubber duck racing. Custom-built within a 10,000-square-foot warehouse is a real-life lazy river that sees eight ducks battle to the finish line on a course featuring wild rapids, twisty whirlpools, wind turbines and rocks. Sam Jones, Founder & CEO, sets out the rationale.
For someone who has never heard of 155.io or ducks.io, what do you want them to know about the content you’re creating?
We see ourselves as closest to being a live dealer product, but what the world does not need more of is more Baccarat or Blackjack games with a presenter dressed in a dickey bow tie. I think that space is overcooked. Whether it is a live dealer product, slot, or a crash game, all I see at industry exhibitions are versions of the same thing.
At 155.io we want to be known for a few things. Firstly, for always being live. Secondly, everything is real world. If it’s a Marble race, a Duck race, Stairpong – it’s happening live somewhere. We want to be known for chaos. We want to create content where anything is possible, and any race participant has got a chance. In summary, I would say live, real world, chaotic, and it fits in your phone. That’s what we’re trying to create, and those characteristics will be in all the games we release.
What 155.io is doing is truly unique. Have there been any surprise fan reactions or community moments since launching the business that have stood out to you?
When we started thinking about different formats, I remember my initial surprise at how popular Marble Racing is on YouTube. Some of the races I watched had 15 million views on the big Marble Racing channels. When we started building Marble tracks in-house- we’ve now built 15 tracks – some of the best ones are the longest ones, but they make terrible betting games because most gamblers want it over with quickly.
The biggest shock for us is you can spend months building a piece of art as a marble track, but bettors aren’t interested as they want to play a much simpler game. That was an early learning curve for us – reducing the size of the art form to get the gambler in.
What 155.io is doing is truly unique. Have there been any surprise fan reactions or community moments since launching the business that have stood out to you?
When we started thinking about different formats, I remember my initial surprise at how popular Marble Racing is on YouTube. Some of their races get 15 million views on the big Marble Racing channels. When we started building Marble tracks in-house – we’ve now built 15 tracks – some of the best ones are the longest, but they make terrible betting games because most gamblers want it over with quickly.
The biggest shock for us is you can spend months building a piece of art as a marble track, but bettors aren’t interested as they want to play a much simpler game. That was an early learning curve for us – reducing the size of the art form to get the gambler in.
You’ve said people love plastic ducks — what made you realise that love could translate into a 24/7 live racing game? Was there a particular spark that inspired ducks.io?
With ducks.io, I remember visiting fairgrounds as a kid, I was the one fishing the ducks out of those cylinder-shaped things. In Florence, Italy Florence last summer I saw a plastic duck shop and could not believe how many varieties were sold – from sportspeople to political leaders to Darth Vader. Then I went to Amsterdam and there was another duck shop, and I started to ask myself why these little characters were so loved by men and women, young and old?
Looking into it further I discovered how popular charity duck racing is. There are huge charity duck races such as one in Chicago where hundreds of thousands of people take part. I lived in Hong Kong for many years so I tracked down the biggest maker of plastic ducks on the planet and I decided to start racing the ducks on a real-life river like you might have done with Poohsticks back in the day. I decided to make it a gambling game.
Can you walk us through the process of turning an empty warehouse into a 24/7 live plastic duck racing arena? Where do you even begin?
Of course, logistically getting a duck race to happen in public is a) probably illegal and b) you’ve got the limitations of darkness and potential phone network issues. I decided to build a river in our studio, so I went to a swimming pool manufacturer that builds fountains for hotels in Dubai and swimming pools for amazing properties. I put a plastic duck on the table and said, “I want to race these” and he responded, “this is the maddest project I’ve ever been part of!”
We then started to design this 30-metre river with tons of water pumps, wind funnels, rocks, trees, and so on. The idea is that every duck which enters the race has a chance. The leading duck might hit a rock and fall to the back. Another one might go into the mouth of a crocodile and lose the race.
What is your expectation for ducks.io?
I’m certain ducks.io will get us attention. I think you either make fame or fortune in these types of games, and my feeling is we might get famous because of it. Maybe we won’t get rich, who knows, but our lobby will consist of a variety of games such as Marble Racing, Coin Tossing and Stairpong. No one really knows what will be popular with bettors until we have a crack at it. That’s what we’re doing at 155.io
How do you go about getting plastic duck racing certified as a gambling product?
If you speak to testing labs, they’ve never seen a plastic duck race or even worked with water, so the easiest way to get the product certified was to get a lottery style machine before the race with eight balls in it. Each ball represents a duck, and every row spits out an order of eight and that is the order you put the ducks in, almost like a grid in the F1. Then you drop them into the river and the random nature is in the start position. The duck race which follows is almost a procession.
Bringing in the lottery style machine means there is a random nature to the start position as you don’t see the start position until the race has started. You can’t certify a duck river because there’s so many rocks and rapids. It’s not like the RNG is connected to the pumps. You can run a thousand races and it’s highly random.
We’ve done it, but you can’t get a testing lab to do it. If they see this duck river, they’re going to have a heart attack. The one thing you can argue is the start position of the river gives a slight advantage; therefore, we’ll have an RNG dictate the start position.
What got you into this line of work? Is your background in technology?
Yes. I built platforms in data visualisation 10 years ago, specifically visualising how investment banks looked from a workplace perspective. I then moved into sports, visualising how things like NBA player statistics work, before creating a fantasy sport platform for football.
Then I spent three and a half years at a company called Wish.com, which is a big e-commerce company. Throughout my career I’ve built products as an entrepreneur and marketer. After Wish went public, I built a live stream shopping company very similar to TikTok Shop.
That’s what got me into the live streaming application side of things. 18 months ago, I was just looking at live dealer B2B platforms and I just thought they looked tired. When I see how the younger generation consume TikTok, they’re never going to watch some guy playing baccarat. It’s just not entertaining enough.
From a tech perspective, how do you manage the continuous, non-stop broadcast and betting system?
We’ve got a great tech team and a very creative studio team. I have not worked in the online casino industry before, so we’re learning some stuff, but we brought in people that have. We’ve built the content feed and the games that layer on top of the content feed, so when we do an integration with a client, they get access to all the games. Marbles, Stairpong, Ducks and whatever comes next sit in a single lobby which we can either release through an aggregator or via a direct integration.
Is the hope to have your own tab in the game lobby?
In some cases, we’ve got it already. For instance, Dafabet has tabs for Marbles and they’re going to have a tab for ducks. Some clients position us in the arcade or crash game tabs, others put us in sport.
One of the challenges we’ve had has come from placing so much emphasis on good video production that everyone thinks our stuff is fake. Because the cameras are such high-quality people think it isn’t real and there’s so much artificial stuff around now. They think it’s computer generated. I have investors and partners saying, why didn’t you just do a real Marble race?
We’re now filming the duck racing with iPhones because we want it to look “more real.” I’ve even asked the team to show someone in the background filming the races to make it feel like a human studio – because it is real! I think this is our edge. In a world of AI generated content, the real nature of our games is what people like.
Compared to Stairpong and Marbles, is ducks an acquisition or a retention play?
Everyone knows plastic duck racing. If six per cent of the world plays slots, significantly more will grasp duck racing as a concept meaning it’s a simple gateway to the industry. I think it’s more of an acquisition play, but we are building retention tools. We have built a daily streak feature which we’re about to release.
If you play ducks or any of the other games on subsequent days, your pricing gets better. We’re adding social features with live streaming commentators, as well as character ducks based on influencers, so they can race against each other. Ducks will get people’s attention, which is arguably more valuable than money, because once you’ve got their attention you can do other stuff.
As a marketer yourself, how are you looking to market these unique concepts to the betting industry?
We’re going to start exhibiting at industry events. I’ve been to a few of them and seen what’s good and what’s not. We’re going to start putting some of our physical tracks in the exhibition so people can see they’re real and be mesmerised by them. We didn’t want to do that too early because the industry does have a habit of stealing ideas.
We’re also using some AI agents to promote the duck racing which we’re about to launch. We’re currently doing some campaign planning with a client where they will offer people their first duck race for free to a certain value just to get them familiar with how the interface works and the experience. We’ve got some other retention tools in the pipeline such as Jackpots, as well as some online marketing. I think ducks has got the potential to be a good sweeps product as well.
