People Behind Eeze Games: Elen Baghdasaryan – Roulette

Innovating a 250-Year-Old Classic

A Day in the Life of a Roulette Product Owner

Both, honestly.. The frame is stable, the picture inside it changes constantly. Mornings are fairly predictable – numbers, standup, whatever has come in overnight. After that it’s a bet! One day I’m deep in a math model working through payout liability and table limits and the next I’m untangling why a feature behaves differently in one enviroment than another, or reviewing a spin parameter that looked innocent until someone asked the right question. The constant is that roulette gives you a very small surface area and an enormous amount of detail hiding underneath it.

The Three Tests of Roulette Design

Roulette is about 250 years old and players have muscle memory for it. That’s the challenge and the gift. Anything you add has to survive three tests at once: the math has to hold, the regulator has to be comfortable in every market you’re licensed in, and the player has to recognise the game in the first two seconds. Roulette players are the most conservative revolutionaries you’ll meet. They want something genuinely new that feels exactly like what they’ve always played. Move the wheel one degree in the wrong direction and they will tell you, immediately and in detail!

Where to Find the Real Opportunities for Innovation

The Golden Rule: Innovate the Theatre, Never the Engine

The core loop is sacred: place your bets, spin, outcome. That’s not where you innovate, that’s what you protect!

The opportunity is in everything wrapped around it. Anticipation, presentation, the reveal, the moment between “no more bets” and the ball settling. That gap is emotionally the richest part of roulette and historically the least designed. AR and multipliers work when they make that moment bigger rather than replacing it. My rule is simple: innovate the theatre, never the engine! If a player has to relearn how to bet, we’ve broken something that took two and a half centuries to get right.

Balancing Operator Customization with Brand Guardrails

It matters enormously, because operators aren’t buying a game, they’re buying something that has to feel like theirs in a lobby with forty other roulette tables in it. Brand consistency, market fit, differentiation. If a product isn’t flexible, it becomes generic, and generic doesn’t survive lobby placement. That said, flexibility needs guardrails. Configurability isn’t a blank canvas. Every option we expose has to still produce a game that’s readable, compliant and playable. Freedom to express your brand – absolutely. Freedom to make the branding on the wheel unreadable – respectfully, no!

Filtering Good Ideas from False Novelties

Essential Advice for Aspiring Product Owners

Learn the math sooner, and stop being polite about it. Ask the mathematicians the question you think is too basic, it usually isn’t, and understanding why a limit or a parameter exists is what separates a PO who ships from one who just coordinates.

Second, compliance isn’t the department that says no. Regulatory constraints are design constraints, and design constraints make better products. The teams that treat them as an afterthought pay for it later, always at the worst moment.

And third, the loudest opinion in the room is never the player’s.

From Game Presenter to Table Designer

What’s one thing people might not expect about you?

I started as a game presenter a decade ago! People are surprised because now I’m the one designing the tables, but what they don’t expect is I still sit down and play them too, just for fun. Dealer, player, product owner, I’ve seen the table from every seat!