Thomas Graf – Problem Solver

There is a pleasing symmetry to sitting down with Thomas Graf in Vienna in 2026. Greentube is celebrating its 25th anniversary, while it’s also approximately 25 years since we first met at NOVOMATIC’s headquarters in Gumpoldskirchen, at a point when neither of us could have predicted how dramatically gaming would change during the quarter-century that followed.

The industry we discussed then was overwhelmingly land-based. Smartphones did not exist. Online casino was embryonic. Social casino had yet to become a category. Omnichannel wasn’t an industry buzzword because the channels that would eventually need connecting had barely been created. Thomas Graf has spent much of the intervening period solving the problems created by those changes.

During a long conversation at Greentube’s Vienna headquarters, what emerges isn’t a career built around one grand prediction of where gaming was heading. Instead, what’s apparent is an ability to recognise when circumstances have changed, understand why an existing model no longer works and keep experimenting until another one does. This instinct runs through his recollections of NOVOMATIC’s early years in the UK, the first attempts to bring land-based games online, the acquisition of Greentube, the explosive digital arrival of Book of Ra, the collapse of a crucial German market and the subsequent diversification of the business.

Today, it informs his thinking about social gaming, regulation, AI, server-based technology and a future in which the distinction between land-based and online gaming becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Twenty-five years on, the technologies have changed enormously, but Thomas Graf’s fundamental question has remained remarkably consistent: what is the problem, and how do we solve it?

Thomas, when we first met 25 years ago, neither of us could have known how dramatically this industry would change. Looking back, has your career unfolded anything like you expected?

At the beginning, it wasn’t foreseeable. There was more of a linear direction to what was happening at the time, but then unforeseen technological changes occurred and started pushing the industry in completely new directions. Sometimes those changes were surprising and they could happen very quickly. My reaction was always that we had to jump on the opportunity.

Innovation has really always been the driver for me – doing something new rather than simply continuing with something because it is already established. What I discovered about gaming is that it is a very dynamic industry. It can initially be sceptical about new possibilities, but it is also very open to innovation and trying new things. That unpredictability is what makes it interesting, and so much of it is driven by technology – not only technology created within gaming, but developments in other industries that change consumer behaviour and therefore change what our customers expect from us.

One of your early examples of that problem-solving approach was NOVOMATIC’s attempt to establish itself in the UK. What did that experience teach you?

The UK was very challenging because it was firmly established around UK companies and products. We entered in 2004 with something completely different. Our product was video-based, had two screens and was around three times more expensive than the average UK product at the time. There were barely any video machines in the market. The games also behaved differently. They were random and could have much greater volatility, whereas operators were accustomed to a much more predictable cashbox.

When we put machines on trial, operators sometimes wanted to return them immediately because they would have a week where the machine lost money. Their reaction was: “I’m not making money with your product.” So we had to change the approach. We effectively said: keep it for six months and don’t pay anything. Give the product enough time to find its audience. Eventually it found a niche in London, particularly closer to the City. Younger customers, including bankers, were more willing to experiment. They were familiar with video games, they liked multi-game products and they wanted faster games and more choice.

In more rural areas it was completely different. Those markets were much more conservative and adoption took longer. It taught me something important: you cannot simply break the mould overnight. Consumers have habits and you have to respect them. You need to find the angle where something new works, establish it there and then see whether that niche can become mainstream. Sometimes you are impatient because you think: why isn’t this working? But you have to understand the essence of why it isn’t working and determine what can be changed without losing the thing you believed in originally.

That sounds like an important distinction. A product failing immediately doesn’t necessarily mean the idea itself is wrong?

Exactly. If something works in another market, theoretically you might think it should work everywhere. But markets have different histories and consumers have different habits. You cannot apply a McDonald’s principle and assume everybody suddenly wants the same thing regardless of what they have consumed before, which is why having a very short feedback loop between R&D and operations is so important. If you have a B2C element, you get feedback directly from the consumer. You can understand what is working, what isn’t working and why. Then you iterate.

Was that always what attracted you to technology – the ability to find another solution rather than simply accept the existing model?

The driver was always the need to innovate and try to be one step ahead, but then you also have to commercialise that advantage. It doesn’t always work in the way you originally expect. Sometimes the technology ends up succeeding in a completely different market from the one you envisaged. But if you believe something can represent the next step, you have to be persistent. You also have to keep watching how consumer behaviour changes.

In the 1980s or 1990s, nobody imagined people would play games on a tiny device like a mobile phone. It wasn’t conceivable. Then developments outside our industry changed consumer behaviour completely. Today apps drive a huge amount of leisure behaviour and gaming has simply become part of that. At the same time, traditional ways of people interacting and playing together haven’t disappeared. I believe they still have a future as well.

When did you first recognise that online gaming was something NOVOMATIC had to participate in?

I was following the internet phenomenon from the early 2000s. Online casinos were appearing and games were beginning to be distributed online. The question for me was: how can we participate in this as a real land-based legacy business? It was clear we couldn’t simply do it with the existing organisation. We had excellent technology people on both the hardware and programming sides, but they had to focus on the core business. Resources naturally follow where the money is being made, and online was still something experimental. We also had another problem: compliance.

As an established licensed company operating in many regulated markets, we couldn’t simply do what some early internet companies were doing and operate outside that framework. We couldn’t risk existing licences. So we had to find another route.

And some of those first routes were quite experimental?

Very experimental. We started with what we already had. We had the server-based NOVO Unity framework, so we experimented with creating something internet-based around that. We developed NOVOMATIC games in Flash and put them onto NOVO Unity terminals. Players registered at a cash desk, deposited money, received a card and could play these Flash games. We put the system into casinos in the Czech Republic.

Then we immediately discovered another problem: why would somebody play Sizzling Hot through this complicated system when they could sit at a normal machine, put money into it and play? So we experimented with the attractiveness of the proposition, including higher RTP and points. It was about learning.

You then tried to get those games onto existing online platforms?

Yes. I was looking at companies emerging in places like Canada and Sweden and asking: how do we get our games into this new market? The UK was progressing quickly with licensed online casinos. Talarius had Quicksilver arcades and an online casino platform, for example, and we looked at whether we could get our games onto that platform. We even had people come from Australia to train our programmers on their software development kit. It was a disaster.

We couldn’t even get a simple three-reel game developed properly on the platform. The person conducting the training became completely overwhelmed by all the questions from our programmers. That particular route ended there. But I didn’t give up because everything around us was continuing to move.

What convinced you that there was a viable route into online?

I saw that IGT had acquired remote game server technology and was deploying games in regulated markets. That was important because I needed to understand whether there was a legal, compliant way of doing this. Once it became clear that there was, the question became: how do we get something like Sizzling Hot online in the UK?

We already had the team in Kraków developing Flash games, so we tasked them with developing something resembling a game server that could distribute our games to UK customers. We established the infrastructure and eventually integrated with customers including Sky. I remember our salesperson getting a meeting with Sky to present NOVOMATIC games and their reaction was essentially: “Who are you and why do we need your games?”

That was the starting point. And it worked, although with only two or three customers it wasn’t really a sustainable business because running all of the server infrastructure was expensive. The important thing was that we were in the game.

Is that what eventually led you towards Greentube?

Yes, because I knew that if online continued developing, we needed something scalable. We needed a proper platform. Maybe one day we would want to operate ourselves. We needed distribution that could extend beyond the UK. Someone within NOVOMATIC had been looking around the market and said there was this small company in Vienna we should talk to. That was my first contact with Greentube and Eberhard Dürrschmid.

They were perhaps 30 people sitting behind computers. Their main business was skill games, particularly Ski Challenge, but I noticed what looked like an information kiosk running some slot-style games. I asked Eberhard what it was and he said it was just an experiment. That caught my attention.

Because suddenly you could see a bridge between what Greentube was doing and NOVOMATIC’s core casino business?

Exactly. The skill games were interesting, but I was looking for how we could bridge this into gambling. Greentube already understood platforms and operations through businesses such as GameTwist and StarGames. It had technology and skills that we didn’t have at that time. Greentube had a different DNA. That was why I thought we had to do something with them.

The history of Greentube’s slot development itself is quite unconventional.

It is. One of the developers around Eberhard’s original group had been playing slots online and thought the games were terrible. He believed he could make much better games himself. He even approached an operator and told them he could develop better games. They weren’t interested. He was so annoyed that he decided to prove it.

He spent his own money playing NOVOMATIC slots amusement arcades and then started developing Flash games himself. When I later saw those games running full-screen on a PC, they looked surprisingly good. At the time, many companies were effectively creating small replicas of physical slot machines on the computer screen. Here was something that actually used the screen properly. Again, I could see the fundamentals of something we needed.

One of the fascinating things about Greentube’s history is that social gaming was already part of the company before social casino became an established category.

Yes, GameTwist had been operating a subscription-based model where users paid a fixed subscription fee, which was relatively modest, for a defined period (for example, one month) and could then play games without additional charges during that period. They found that people were buying subscriptions for extended periods, ranging from several months to, in some cases, more than a year.

While analysing this behaviour, they saw it demonstrated very strong customer engagement, and it was the trigger for the transition from a subscription model to a virtual currency-based model. Players were paying for entertainment despite knowing they could not win real money. This included not only casino-style games but also skill games, which at that time comprised a significant portion of the portfolio. This model was something that later became commonplace across app store ecosystems.

What was the moment when you realised bringing NOVOMATIC and Greentube together had genuinely changed the potential of the business?

I think the pivotal moment came when Novomatic games began to gain significant popularity across online channels. The success really exceeded expectations. The games effectively promoted themselves through player recognition and word-of-mouth because players already knew and trusted our titles. This success represented the moment when it became clear that online gaming could develop into a major business segment.

Why was it important that Greentube retained its own identity after becoming part of NOVOMATIC?

Because you couldn’t fully integrate it. There were discussions about moving everything, but I said no. Greentube had its own DNA and its own company culture. The best thing we could do was support it and, in many respects, leave it alone. We could help determine strategy and provide resources, but the biggest support was content. NOVOMATIC’s best-performing blue-chip titles became a lifeline for Greentube because they could be introduced across B2B and social casinos, and then later B2C.

The business subsequently faced a major shock when circumstances changed in Germany. How important was that episode in shaping the Greentube we see today?

Germany represented a huge concentration of the business. When the situation changed, we had to react very quickly. We had to restructure and redefine what the future should look like. The big lesson was that we couldn’t depend primarily on one market. We had to diversify.

We started looking much more seriously at B2C opportunities in other markets, with Italy being an obvious example. We expanded social gaming, developed products such as GameTwist further and added other products to the portfolio. Later we looked at acquisitions and other opportunities.
Would we have innovated and diversified as quickly if Germany hadn’t happened? Probably not. Sometimes adversity forces you to look much more seriously at how you mitigate risk.

That makes diversification itself part of the problem-solving philosophy?

Yes. You need different business lines if you want to be more robust. Having B2B and B2C, different markets and different channels means you’re less exposed when something happens that nobody predicted. Look at the pandemic. Nobody could have forecast that, but digital became the only lifeline for many businesses during that period. It helped keep the wider group operating and paying salaries.

We also had land-based casino customers where online became incredibly important because tourism and physical visitation collapsed – which demonstrates why diversification matters. You cannot predict the next crisis, but you can build a business that is capable of responding when it arrives.

Greentube today operates across B2B, B2C and social gaming. Is that diversity a legacy of its origins or something you now see as fundamental to its future?

Greentube actually began as a social gaming and skill-game company. B2B became a significant business segment later, as did real-money B2C gaming once the markets became regulated and licensed. In some ways, that reminds me of NOVOMATIC’s own history. Technology and R&D became a means to an end because if you want to innovate in your own operations, you don’t want to remain dependent on somebody else – which ultimately created a fully integrated group.

Greentube has followed a different path, but the principle is similar. You build capabilities because they solve problems.

You’ve also pushed for closer connections between NOVOMATIC’s land-based operations and Greentube’s digital expertise. Has that always been easy?

There were periods where the two sides didn’t necessarily understand each other. Sometimes online was perceived as a threat by land-based businesses entering the same market. But we have to recognise that we’re talking about the same ecosystem and sometimes the same players. Growth is increasingly happening in digital, while in mature land-based markets growth can be relatively flat. The answer isn’t to have those businesses fighting each other. It is to understand how they can create incremental value together. Spain and Italy are good examples. We have worked towards getting the land-based and online teams much more closely aligned and asking how the online business can create additional revenue from players connected with physical venues. Once everybody can see that in the P&L, the conversation changes.

Luxembourg appears to be one of the clearest examples yet of your long-standing vision for convergence. Why is that project important?

For a long time I have believed land-based and online are ultimately one ecosystem. The difficulty is that regulation doesn’t necessarily see it that way. Land-based gaming has historically been extremely localised and heavily restricted, while online originally developed with far fewer restrictions. Now the two are converging.

Online is becoming increasingly regulated. We see minimum game times, stake limits, loss limits and other requirements that are very familiar from land-based gaming, which creates an opportunity for us because we understand both environments.

Luxembourg gave us an opportunity to bring many parts of the group together in one real market. We have lottery, sports betting, games, server-based technology, terminals, cash handling and even elements such as the physical fit-out coming from within the group. With registered play, a customer can use a wallet, scan a QR code, transfer funds to a machine, play and return the money to the wallet afterwards. For me, that’s where omnichannel stops being a presentation slide and becomes something real.

What makes that different from the way omnichannel is often discussed?

Everybody talks about omnichannel, but where is the real application in a real market? Luxembourg is a compact market where we can develop these functionalities and understand how they work commercially and operationally. Our activities in the region are conducted under the Luxembourg lottery licence, under which we operate around 600 VLT and sports betting terminals. We have also developed the Lucky Bar concept, combining gaming and sports betting (under the lottery licence) with a social environment, which we operate as a retail concept.

The next stage is taking those learnings into a casino environment and connecting that with an online casino we operate. Then you have a full 360-degree B2C application. Ultimately, elements of that can become B2B products as well.

That project seems remarkably similar philosophically to your story about entering the UK decades earlier: the technology exists, but you have to find the environment where its advantages become meaningful.

It is similar. With the UK product, people initially didn’t believe in it because it was expensive and unfamiliar. I said: give it time.

With server-based technology, we had similar experiences. We developed systems for years and sometimes deployed them in markets where there wasn’t enough commercial advantage over the existing products. The technology worked, but that didn’t automatically mean the business model worked. Then Luxembourg came along and suddenly there was a tender that required sports betting, games, lottery integration, online capability and terminals. Now all the pieces had a reason to exist together. That’s the difference. Technology for the sake of technology isn’t enough. You need the problem that makes the solution valuable.

Why has problem solving been such a focus of your career – and do you recognise that attribute?

I think what I see are changes coming from outside the industry, innovations happening elsewhere or opportunities emerging in another market, and then I ask how they can be applied. You have to think outside the box and try things. But you also need somewhere to test them.

Ideally, you have a friendly customer or your own operating environment because you need that feedback. Otherwise you don’t know what is still missing. Then you need the short loop back into R&D so you can iterate until you have something that can actually be commercialised.

One example is the premium gaming chair that emerged from something you observed in Macau?

Yes. I was visiting a casino in Macau and was shown a high-limit area and an ultra-VIP area. They had spent enormous amounts on the decoration and there was lots of space between machines, giving players privacy. But I looked at the actual gaming experience and the product was basically the same. The player was still sitting at a conventional machine.

I asked the person running the VIP area: if you had one wish for manufacturers, what would you change? The discussion eventually became: why can’t this feel like sitting in a private jet? The player should be as comfortable as possible. They should have their own settings. You don’t necessarily need the traditional metal box; you need the screen and an interface to play the game. We developed the idea, tested it in our own operations and it became a very successful product. That’s how these things often happen.
You observe something, identify what is missing and ask whether there is another way to do it.

You are now applying that same thinking in the opposite direction by bringing online-native games into land-based environments.

For a long time, convergence was viewed mainly as taking successful land-based games and putting them online. That obviously works. Book of Ra is a perfect example because the brand is established and the integrity of the game can be preserved. But what about the other direction?

There is now an entire generation of players whose first gambling experience is online. Some may never have visited an arcade or casino. So why shouldn’t a game they already know online become the reason they engage with a physical machine? We have experimented with bringing successful online content into land-based environments.

At an exhibition in the Netherlands, for example, we had an online game running on a physical machine. A young guy came over and recognised it immediately because he played it online. He hadn’t known it existed on a machine. Then he said he owned five bars and wanted machines. That clicked for me.
If you have a brand that people already know online and you can translate it successfully into an experience that complies with the land-based market, that can become the bridge.

Is attracting that online generation into physical venues one of the industry’s biggest long-term challenges?

Absolutely. Otherwise, at some point younger consumers will ask: why should I go there? Physical venues need to become social spaces where people interact. Technology can become the catalyst connecting those experiences. I can imagine a streamer playing in a physical venue while people online participate in the same tournament or experience.

Technologically, we can do many of these things. The challenge is how you make them work within regulation.

Does that mean the distinction between land-based and online eventually becomes less useful?

I think those areas will converge. The consumer doesn’t necessarily think in those categories. They want to access entertainment through whatever technology is available to them. But the glue is always the game. And ideally the game becomes a brand.

If a brand has survived for more than 20 years, like Book of Ra, that tells you something about the strength of the underlying game. Look at roulette. It hasn’t disappeared. For many young people visiting a casino for the first time, roulette may still be the first game they play. It is simple, everybody understands it and it has a community element. Technology changes, but those fundamentals remain important.

Does 25 years of experience therefore remain relevant even when you’re dealing with technologies that didn’t exist when Greentube began?

Definitely, because you always have to remain player-centric. How people experience what we provide is the essence of the business. Technology can be completely new, but understanding why people engage with a game, why they want to play together or why they respond to a particular environment remains valuable. This experience helps you make decisions about new technology because the technology itself isn’t the objective. The player experience is.

Regulation has become significantly more complex during that 25-year period. Does that make innovation harder?

It makes innovation even more important. The playing field isn’t always equal because regulated businesses have to operate within restrictions while black-market operators may ignore them. But we cannot solve that by ignoring regulation ourselves.

We have to innovate within the boundaries available to us. The advantage we have is that we now understand a huge amount about compliance from both land-based and online gaming. Those two worlds are increasingly dealing with similar restrictions and that knowledge becomes part of the solution.

Is Greentube particularly valuable within the wider group because it can experiment in areas that might be harder to pursue within a traditional land-based organisation?

Yes, but it can still become part of the bigger group solution. That’s the real strength. Greentube has the people and the technology, and we also have the wider group behind us. Content from NOVOMATIC was fundamental to Greentube’s development, and today with projects involving server-based technology and physical hardware, that group support becomes important again. The strength is combining those synergies while retaining the ability to innovate.

Ultimately, we are moving towards networked gaming and towards solutions rather than simply products. The solution starts with the game. Good games drive everything, and technology supports that.

So the future supplier is increasingly selling a solution rather than a machine or an individual game?

Yes. Some hardware is becoming commoditised. You can source monitors and PC components. You don’t necessarily need to manufacture every individual component yourself. The real value is increasingly in the solution. That can span many different areas. We have technology businesses providing compliance-related software-as-a-service solutions. We have server-based gaming. We have online platforms. We have B2C operations.

I see the same direction across land-based and online because those areas will increasingly converge. Exactly what device consumers will use in the future, I don’t know. But as long as screens remain relevant and people want to consume gaming content, the rest is up to us.

Has Greentube’s history taught you that adversity can actually accelerate innovation?

Sometimes pressure forces you to look much more carefully at how you mitigate risk. Germany is a good example. Historically, Greentube had significant exposure there. When that market changed, we had to face reality. It became a survival issue.

We had to rethink the business, spread the risk, expand B2B, enter other markets and look at acquisitions and new technologies. Without that pressure, perhaps we would have continued doing what was already working and wouldn’t have diversified as much or as quickly. So adversity can certainly create invention. But the important thing is what you do with it.

After 25 years, what gives Greentube the ability to keep adapting to whatever comes next?

We have the people, we have the technology and we have the whole NOVOMATIC group as support. That gives us the ability to innovate within the constraints of regulation and to combine capabilities when we need them. But you still have to keep looking ahead.

You have to recognise technological changes, understand wider trends and adopt them where they make sense. Look at game formats. Crash games didn’t exist in the mainstream 10 or 15 years ago. Other mechanics have emerged from mobile gaming and completely different forms of entertainment. The next generation may not interact with gaming in the same way our generation did. That is why you have to remain curious.

You need to understand how consumers are changing and how technology is changing, while remembering that the core question hasn’t really changed. What experience does the player want – and how do we build the right solution around it?