More than 300 slots in the catalogue, and until now nobody at Booming Games held senior responsibility for selling them. That changed this week.
Ally McIvor takes the Booming Games chief of sales role
Booming Games has appointed Ally McIvor as chief of sales, a position that did not previously exist at the Malta-based supplier. She will lead the entire sales department, with every member of the team reporting directly to her, and she reports in turn to chief commercial officer Michael Waterfield. McIvor arrives having held commercial, partnership and operations roles at Microgaming, Games Global and iSoftBet.
The headline is the appointment. The more interesting detail is the word “new”. A B2B studio with a portfolio past the 300-game mark had been running its sales function without a dedicated senior owner, which tells you something about how fast the content side of the business has outpaced the commercial side.
| Detail | Specifics |
|---|---|
| Role | Chief of sales (newly created) |
| Appointee | Ally McIvor |
| Reports to | Michael Waterfield, chief commercial officer |
| Remit | Entire sales team, all direct reports |
| Previous employers | Microgaming, Games Global, iSoftBet |
| Company | Booming Games, Malta-based B2B supplier, 300+ slots |
The problem a 300-game catalogue actually creates
Volume is the easy part of being a slot studio now. Getting those games in front of players is the hard part, and the two problems are frequently confused.
A studio can ship two games a month, certify them for half a dozen regulated markets, push them into the major aggregators and still see most of them die in the long tail of a casino lobby. Operators run finite promotional real estate: a handful of featured tiles, a new-games carousel that rotates weekly, a recommendation engine weighted toward whatever is already performing. Without somebody whose job is to argue for placement, game by game and operator by operator, a 300-title library becomes a cost centre rather than a revenue base. Studios pay for the art, the maths, the certification and the integration whether the game gets exposure or not.
That is the gap a chief of sales exists to close. Not lead generation. Not signing new operator contracts in the abstract. Sell-through on content that already exists.
What the reporting line reveals
McIvor reports to the chief commercial officer rather than directly to the chief executive, and that choice is deliberate. Sales is being positioned as a discipline inside a wider commercial function, not as a parallel power base.
There is a practical reason to prefer it this way. When sales reports to the top of the house independently, the usual outcome is a studio that chases whatever the sales team can close fastest, which tends to mean volume deals with aggregators and less emphasis on which markets the games are actually built for. Keeping sales under a CCO forces account strategy, product roadmap and market prioritisation into the same conversation. It is slower. It is also harder to game.
The risk sits on the other side: a chief of sales with full team ownership but no seat at the executive table can end up executing a commercial strategy they had no hand in writing. Whether that happens here depends entirely on how Booming Games splits decision rights between McIvor and Waterfield, and the announcement does not say.
Why her background matters more than the title
Microgaming, Games Global and iSoftBet are three very different schools of distribution, and that combination is unusual.
Microgaming ran one of the industry’s largest third-party content aggregation businesses, which Games Global subsequently took on. Anyone who worked that side of the business learned distribution from the position of the party controlling the shelf, deciding which studios get pushed to which operators and on what terms. iSoftBet was the opposite vantage point: a content studio fighting for room on somebody else’s shelf, with a strong back-office and promotional-tools layer attached.
McIvor has sat on both sides of that negotiation, in commercial, partnership and operations roles. For a studio whose games mostly reach players through aggregators rather than direct integrations, that is the single most relevant thing on the CV. Knowing how an aggregator’s commercial team decides what to promote is worth considerably more than a contact list.
The move I would question
Creating a senior sales role is the right call. Creating it this late is the part worth flagging.
A studio that reaches 300-plus titles before appointing dedicated sales leadership has, by definition, spent years producing content faster than it built the machinery to commercialise it. Some of that catalogue is now old enough that no amount of sales effort will get it re-promoted; slot lobbies are ruthless about age. The honest reading is that McIvor inherits a back catalogue where a meaningful share of the titles will never earn their development cost back, and her real mandate is to make sure the next 100 games do not go the same way.
What I would not do in her position is start by renegotiating revenue share percentages. The percentage is rarely what is holding a studio back. Exposure is. A game at a worse rev-share split in a featured lobby position earns more than a favourable split buried on page four.
What this says about where Booming Games thinks it is going
Hiring a first chief of sales is a signal that the company expects to grow by selling harder into markets it already supplies, not by producing more games. That is a different growth model from the one most mid-sized slot studios default to.
The supplier market has split. A small group of studios command lobby placement almost automatically, through either scale or a recognisable mechanic that players seek out by name. Everyone else competes for whatever is left, and in that tier the commercial team decides the outcome more than the game design does. Booming Games appears to have concluded it belongs in the second group and has staffed accordingly.
The measure of whether this worked will not be new operator logos on a press release. It will be whether the next tranche of releases holds lobby position past the first month, and whether any of the existing 300 get a second life in markets they were never properly pushed into. Neither shows up in an appointment announcement. Both will be visible within a year.