INTERVIEW AUGUST 2026

Interview with Tony O'Mahony: When you try to be all things to all people, you end up doing lots of things in a mediocre fashion

The Relax Gaming CPO on what operators actually want from a studio, why responsible design cannot start at compliance, and the X-factor that no AI can replicate.

Why focus can be a game-changer

The move toward event-level releases — fewer titles, more concentrated effort behind each — has become a stated direction for Relax Gaming. O'Mahony is precise about what it requires, and precise about what it costs.
Every release consumes headspace. It draws on studio capacity, marketing bandwidth, commercial attention, and operator interactions. In a market where the number of new titles launched globally continues to climb, each individual release risks arriving into an environment where operators have become numb to the noise. The answer, in his view, is not to add to the noise but to create genuine events — moments where the entire business is aligned behind making something significant happen.
That discipline produces harder decisions. Concepts that are commercially sound but not differentiated enough do not make it past prototype. Themes that look appealing but cannot carry a mechanic that is genuinely new are set aside. The internal standard is not “can we build this?”, but “does this have something new to say?”
The Money Train franchise sits at the sharpest edge of this tension. Relax had positioned Money Train 4 as the series' final instalment. The question the team asked was not can we make another Money Train, but do we have a new direction worth taking for this IP. The answer, when the team began exploring progression mechanics that had evolved since Money Train 4, was yes. Money Train 5 is scheduled for release on 24 September 2026.

The Guitar Quest origin story illustrates the same standard from a different angle. The concept emerged from a brainstorming session about retro video games. A Game Product Owner pitched an idea inspired by music video games of the 1990s and early 2000s. The room lit up. O'Mahony is direct about what that signal means: when a team that evaluates new game concepts every week is still excited by a prototype, it is worth following.

"When you get that lightning, when it lights everybody up, it is usually a good sign that you should pull on that thread a little bit." Guitar Quest was the first concept O'Mahony approved after joining Relax. It went on to become the company's Game of the Quarter for Q2 2026.

The spider's web: what distribution at scale actually teaches you

Relax sits, in O'Mahony's phrase, at the centre of a spider's web. Through its Silver Bullet partner programme and its platform-to-platform aggregation layer, the company connects thousands of games to over a thousand operator brands. The two products are structurally different. Silver Bullet is a curated strategic partnership — Relax selects studios that fill specific gaps in its portfolio, lowers the barrier to market entry for those partners, and takes on commercial and marketing work alongside them. The platform-to-platform layer is purely distribution; Relax does not market or commercially represent those titles, but makes them available across its infrastructure.

The practical consequence is that Relax has visibility across a range of player behaviour and operator decision-making that a pure studio cannot access. O'Mahony describes this as one of the things that genuinely attracted him to the role: the breadth of levers available. If a game does not perform, the platform does not collapse. If an operator arrives with a specific problem — a drop in average revenue per user, a retention gap in a particular player segment — Relax can respond with a tailored combination of its own titles, Silver Bullet content, jackpot products, and promotional tools, rather than a single game recommendation.

The ambition he describes for Relax is more specific than portfolio breadth. He wants the product offering to become more than the sum of its parts — a value proposition that an operator can configure to solve a named problem, rather than a catalogue to browse. Whether that means bundling games with jackpot mechanics and operator-facing tools into a coherent commercial package, or something more structural, he does not detail. But the direction is away from being a content supplier with aggregation capabilities, and toward being a platform that produces measurable commercial outcomes for operators.

The X-factor: what player experience is actually made of

Product managers, O'Mahony observes, can get very absorbed in features, mechanics, and mathematics. These are the things that can be specified, tested, and iterated. They are also, in his view, not what any player remembers about a game.
What a player remembers is how the game made them feel. The X-factor — the intangible quality that separates a good title from a great title — is emotional rather than functional. He illustrates it with an example from digital banking. One provider allows users to freeze a lost card within the app. That is the functional answer to a real problem. Another offers the same feature, but when you freeze your card, the card appears encased in ice on screen. When you unfreeze it, you watch the ice melt. The functionality is identical. The emotional experience is entirely different. Someone put heart into the second version, and that is what the user remembers. "That is the thing that, if we were to ask an AI to create a slot, that slot would not have."
Studios that are turning out high volumes of titles — and O'Mahony is careful not to be dismissive, acknowledging there are many ways to make good games — can produce work that carries what he calls an empty feeling. The mechanics are present, the maths are sound, but without a genuine focus on how the experience feels to the player, something important is missing.
Responsible design, in his account, operates the same way. If responsible gaming is applied as an afterthought — a compliance check run at the end of development to satisfy a regulatory requirement —it hurts the product. His position is that it starts at concept, runs through every design decision, and is built into the culture of the studio rather than imposed on it at the end of the process. A game should be exciting and engaging without creating unnecessary intensity or misleading the player about what they are experiencing. "I want my players to come away with a positive experience. I don't want anybody to feel misled, or brought into a situation where they are not comfortable."
The largest challenge he identifies for the industry is not a studio problem. It is a structural one. Every online casino increasingly looks the same. Innovation at the B2B level gets sold to everyone simultaneously, and the result is that the differentiation disappears the moment it is distributed. Bringing something genuinely new to market in a commercially viable package is, in his view, the hardest and most important problem in online casino right now.

What draws the argument together is the same thing that drew O'Mahony into product management in the first place — the ability to hold the technical, commercial, emotional, and human elements of a product in the same frame at the same time, while representing the people who are not in the room. In iGaming, those people are players. The industry builds for them at enormous scale, through machinery of extraordinary complexity.

Whether that machinery is pointed in the right direction — toward experiences that are genuinely worth having — is the question that sits underneath every product decision made at a company like Relax Gaming.

Article written by Elisabet Johansson.

Further Reading & Key Sources

Focus Gaming News, May 2026: Tony O'Mahony — 'We want games to feel like they take players somewhere, rather than just cycling through spins'

iGaming Expert, June 2026: Relax Gaming — Money Train 5

iGaming Business, August 2025: Tony O'Mahony joins Relax Gaming as new Chief Product Officer