INTERVIEW AUGUST 2026
Interview with Helen Walton: “The Finish Line Is the Beginning Line”
After a decade split between lottery and casino content, G.Games is staking most of its team on a single new launch.
Interview
Our editor had a conversation with Helen Walton, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of G Games, about the ambition she and her co-founders have carried since they first started working together fifteen years ago, only now ready to launch. The culmination of their original ambition is a series of games: 99 Royale, due out with operators including bet365 and Casumo in September 2026, and roughly ninety per cent of G Games' team is currently working on it. It is the company's largest and most exposed release to date.
Helen Walton, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at G.Games. Image courtesy of G Games.
Box-out: Helen Walton — Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer, G Games
Organisation: G Games
Background: Walton studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge before joining a graduate programme at Unilever. She went on to work in FMCG brand management at Boots and PZ Cussons, then spent a decade as an independent branding consultant. She later co-wrote eighteen books on delivering software at scale for a course called Value Flow Quality, which became an Agile Practitioner qualification approved by the British Computer Society.
In 2014 she co-founded Gamevy alongside Dan Rough and Paul Dolman-Darrall. Gamevy merged with Glück Games in 2018 to form G Games, which today employs roughly fifty to sixty people across the UK, Spain and India, working remotely from a hub in London.
INDUSTRY perspective
"It's hard to be proud of doing the same thing over and over."
— Helen Walton, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer, G Games
Cambridge, Unilever, and a Decade in Branding
Walton studied English Literature at Cambridge before joining a graduate programme at Unilever, which she describes as both an interesting education and a proper entry into business, giving her a network across major brands. She went on to work in FMCG, staying focused throughout on product, brand and how a company talks to its customers.
She says she learned a great deal working for big brands, but as a person she loves things that move fast, and presenting the same pitch at nine different levels of an organisation did not suit her. She went on to work as a brand consultant for ten years, writing for clients including Jemma Kidd and Jamie Oliver.
One evening at a client dinner, she found herself loudly disagreeing with the claims made by "agile" and how it was descending into cargo-cult jargon. The next day, a recruiter called her about her ‘interesting ideas’. That call is how she met her two future co-founders, Dan Rough and Paul Dolman-Darrall, and together the three wrote eighteen books on delivering software products at scale. By the end of the project, the three of them were determined to leave consulting and build something of their own. None of the three had any real experience in gambling, but they founded a new studio built on a common vision of a multiplayer concept.
Their first release was a multiplayer, micropayment social game. The company was bootstrapped for its first four years without financing. After that, they secured financing and began building a studio focused on lottery and casino content. The original core ambition, from the start, was always multiplayer.
Walton also spoke, early in the conversation, about diversity in the gambling industry. She believes there is probably more diversity in gaming than in most other industries: many people build careers from the shop floor, for example in a betting shop or customer service, and a refreshing number of people in the industry don’t have a degree.
Yet while the industry is pan-European, it continues to struggle with a legacy of sexism and a lack of racial diversity. It is also a small, insular industry where many managers rotate from one company to another, and she believes industry experience is sometimes overvalued while a fresh influx of experience from other industries is undervalued.
A live test session of 99 Royale during a Bally's testing evening. Image courtesy of G Games.
Fifteen Years Later, the Timing Is Finally Right
The multiplayer ambition Walton and her co-founders had fifteen years ago has changed over the years but is finally taken concrete form in a series of games launching in September. Twelve years ago, she says, the timing was not right, and neither the technology nor the industry was ready. In the years since, the studio has gained the experience and the capability to make a bet of this size.
G Gaming Limited is the assignee of U.S. Patent No. 11,731,042, issued on 22 August 2023 and naming Christopher Mawdesley, Nathan Williams and Paul Dolman-Darrall as inventors. The patent describes an architecture that connects otherwise separate games of chance to a multiplayer engine, allowing each player's results to update a shared competitive state, such as health, power, attacks or ranking. The CEO of G Games, Paul Dolman-Darrall, told NEXT.io in February 2025 that the studio had already spent £15 million on the multiplayer product, with a further £5 million expected before launch — on top of an earlier prototype, also costing around £5 million, that the studio scrapped entirely and rebuilt from scratch. It was granted in the US in August 2023, with the corresponding European filing still pending as of February 2025, according to NEXT.io
Walton says it is exciting to launch a product the studio is genuinely proud of. "If it fails – in a really important sense - it won’t matter. At least we have tried to build something we really care about; that we are truly proud of," she says. "It's hard to be proud of doing the same thing over and over or secretly knowing you’re taking ‘inspiration’ from someone else." She recalls one client telling her they would spend marketing budget on the studio if it gave them the product for nothing. “That’s the thinking you get when product is commodity,” she says. “But if product or content has a genuine appeal then it changes the conversation. It stops being about price, and starts being about acquisition and retention because of something players care about too.”
On artificial intelligence, Walton is brief: "We saw how the commercials of gaming were changing five years ago – and we knew that AI would exacerbate the change. Of course we work with AI, but it’s not a silver bullet to deliver innovation.”
She describes today's casino content market as increasingly polarised. At the low end, there is a large volume of low-cost content which is commodity. At the high end, a small number of blockbuster titles have built genuine communities around them. The problem, she says, is being stuck in the middle.
G Games has been working on 99 Royale for five years. It started with three developers, and today ninety per cent of the company is involved. "This is by far the biggest bet we have ever taken," Walton says. When the company was smaller, she adds, a release on this scale would have been a killer; it could not have absorbed the risk. Right now, G Games has not put out a regular release in a couple of months, its full attention on this massive launch of a new way to play slots.
There have been points, Walton says, where it felt like they would never get there, and it has been exhausting. G Games is a relatively small team that has been working long and hard for a sustained period, and keeping up her own energy and belief in the project for five years has not always been easy.
Helen Walton and the G.Games team at Bally's, during testing of 99 Royale. Image courtesy of G Games.
Testing, Targeting, and Finding the Right Balance
The company has done extensive user research and testing across the industry, and operators have agreed to support the launch, according to Walton. Bally's took part in beta testing, with around 5,800 players involved, a figure provided by G Games and not independently verified. Walton says it made a real difference once players could see the impact of battles — good and bad — on their bankroll in real time.
Early testing has shown that traditional slots players – such as older women - find the game overwhelming. The target market is video gamers who also enjoy a bet – which tends to mean younger, competitive men. For these players, Walton says, a competitive game that feels more like a mobile or video game simply makes sense.
"We could not win on an even bet, so we need to be different," Walton says. She frames this as a question of balance rather than pure positioning: 99 Royale needs to be distinctive enough to build a real fanbase without being so niche that a mainstream operator would pass on it. Getting that balance right, in her words, is what makes a company as big as bet365 want the game on its own front page.
Walton and her co-founders have now worked together for fifteen years, and she describes the relationship as feeling like a real family: built on trust and, at times, love, but also irritation and frustration. That closeness usually extends to the wider team through a yearly retreat that brings everyone together in person; although with the whole company focused on this launch, it has not happened this year.
In a way, Walton says, the finish line is actually just the beginning line. The launch is really when everything starts. She admits that with this view in mind, it is hard to take the time to stop and celebrate achievements.
Community, Distribution, and What Comes Next
Asked what inspired the thinking behind 99 Royale, Walton says the team looked a lot at video games, particularly nostalgic titles with a strong community around them. Casino play, she says, is solitary, and how to create a community within it is a question the industry has not solved in spite of experiments with streamers leading play; community rooms and forums or leaderboards and gamification. On 99 Royale itself, she is candid: "We know our insights are right, but is our execution right? Have we solved it?"
Distribution, Walton says, is what matters for any product, and it is squarely her job. As Chief Commercial Officer, she has spent much of this project working to make sure 99 Royale has the right distribution and support of commercial operators behind it. G.Games could not have launched this twelve years ago; it did not have the distribution relationships or the commercial experience the format demanded, whatever the quality of the idea itself.
99 Royale is set to launch on 24 September — payday, as Walton puts it, in the UK.
Asked a more personal question, Walton says one of her biggest weaknesses is that she is bad at tolerating boredom. Given a challenge, she works well under pressure, but struggles if she’s bogged down without progress. Getting 99 Royale right has been an exercise in control and patience – walking a fine line between the imperative to get something in market, and the need to ensure it’s right first time. Right now, she says she thinks a lot about how the industry will actually respond to the launch, and whether competitors will copy it. She is looking forward to being surprised by the answer.
Taken together, Walton's account offers a fairly direct set of lessons for anyone building a product on a similar timescale: distribution has to be treated as its own discipline, not an afterthought to the idea; timing can sink a good concept as easily as a bad one; and the middle of a crowded market is the place to avoid, not the place to compete. In Helen's and G.Games' case, that meant keeping energy high across the team for five years while developing 99 Royale, their biggest bet yet.
Artwork for 99 Royale, G.Games upcoming multiplayer slot title. Image courtesy of G Games.
Further Reading & Key Sources
99 Royale: product website, G Games, 2026
G3 Newswire, June 2026: bet365 locks in 99Royale launch as industry giants prepare for Battle London
Justia Patents, granted August 2023: Multi-player game system, US11731042
The iGaming Leader podcast, March 2025:
Naive or Ballsy? Building a Company from Scratch in an Industry You Don't Know, with Helen Walton
NEXT.io, February 2025: Breakfast with NEXT: G Games CEO on the battle to build multiplayer slots
