The Ones Who Stayed: Dejan Jovic and 16 years of building BlueOcean Gaming from scratch
GameHub 2.0 marks BlueOcean’s next phase, moving beyond game aggregation through AI, Personalisation, Jackpots, Sweepstakes and its innovative new streaming side-bet engine, Ride Along.
BlueOcean Gaming came close to disappearing before it properly existed.
In 2009, the project that would become the company was struggling to get off the ground. People were leaving, money was running low and there was little reason to assume it would survive. Dejan Jovic stayed. So did a small group of colleagues who believed they could still make it work.
“The real breakthrough came about two years into building our platform, when we went live with our first client. At that point the project was close to being abandoned, we were nearly out of money, and some people had already left. But a handful of us who stayed genuinely believed we could make it work.”
That first client changed the trajectory. What had started as a difficult project became a business, and Jovic found himself increasingly central to its development.
Jovic grew up in Nova Gorica, a small Slovenian town on the Italian border known locally as “The Monte Carlo of Slovenia”. Casinos were part of the landscape, although his first ambition was to become a footballer. When that did not work out, he turned to technology.
His early jobs involved training people, fixing machines and eventually becoming a systems administrator. By the time he joined the company that would become BlueOcean Gaming, he was comfortable with the technical infrastructure behind the business, working across virtual servers, Linux, Apache and MySQL while also handling support, testing and product tasks. The gambling industry was still relatively small. Jovic remembers around 50 game providers and a market dominated by a handful of operators in concentrated jurisdictions. When the first client arrived and the platform began attracting major suppliers, the opportunity became clearer.
NetEnt and Evolution were among the early names to come aboard. Around the same period, the company’s owner moved to Malta to expand the operation, and Jovic became CEO in 2016. The title was significant, but perhaps less important than what he had to learn about running a growing company. Jovic admits he stayed too close to the daily operation for too long. Eventually, he learned to delegate and put more trust in the people around him, including his long-serving CFO and CTO.
That philosophy now extends beyond management. Jovic looks for people who make companies stronger rather than simply making themselves indispensable. He prefers optimism, certainty and preparation over expecting the worst. The lesson applies in difficult situations too: when a hire or project goes wrong, he believes the answer is to address it directly rather than spend too long trying to win back what has already gone.
That pragmatism is visible in BlueOcean’s next phase. Aggregation remains the foundation, but GameHub 2.0 is designed to go considerably further. The focus is no longer simply on having a large catalogue of games. Speed, data, personalisation and scale are becoming equally important. The platform brings together tools including Jackpots, Drops, Leaderboards, Free Rounds, Lucky Wheel and a Recommendations Engine, while Ride Along adds a streaming side-bet engine to the mix. AI and personalisation are increasingly central to how BlueOcean wants operators to use the platform, with the aim of giving players more relevant content and making the existing inventory work harder.
It is a significant evolution for a company whose early objective was simply survival. Six people were there when the company began. More than 70 are now part of the operation, reflecting both the growth of BlueOcean and the length of time Jovic has spent building it. Sixteen years on, the most striking part of the story is perhaps not how much BlueOcean has changed, but how much of its history is still visible in what it is becoming. The people who stayed through the difficult years helped build the platform that exists today. GameHub 2.0 is the latest version of that idea: take what works, keep improving it and build the next stage without forgetting what got you there.
Jovic never set out to become CEO. He was trying to keep the machinery running. He never set out to create the biggest project of his career. He simply kept going when there was a strong chance it might not survive. After 16 years, that persistence has become one of BlueOcean’s defining assets. And with GameHub 2.0, the company is betting that staying power still has somewhere to go.
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