The man behind the claw: Who keeps Clawee running

In January, Ido Brosh, chairman of the Israeli game developers' association GameIS, wrote in The Jerusalem Post that gaming has been left out of the "Start-Up Nation" story, even though it brings in about $10 billion a year. When Israeli gaming does get attention, it is usually through mobile studios like Playtika and Moon Active. Some games, though, run on real machines. And those machines are built and repaired by people whose names rarely come up.

Clawee belongs to that world. Claw machines were designed for shopping malls. They have opening hours, breaks and nights when the mall closes. The warehouse in Petah Tikva has none of that. The machines run around the clock, every day of the year, and players log in from the U.S., Canada, Japan and about a dozen other countries. The claw was the first thing to give out under that load: It overheated and broke down.

At an arcade, a broken machine gets an "Out of Order" sign, and a repairman comes by in the evening. Clawee has no evenings and no weekends. Players want the machines at any hour, and every hour of downtime is money the company will never earn.

Dealing with that falls to the people in the warehouse. Since 2018, Iakimenko has been one of them.

Gigantic was founded in 2017. In 2020, Clawee won Best Indie Game at the Samsung Best of Galaxy Store Awards. By 2022, the app had been downloaded 16 million times and drew 1.5 million players a month, and the fleet had grown from four machines to 400, according to CTech. In 2024, Calcalist counted 550.

Journalists who covered Clawee mostly talked to the founders. The conversations centered on its growth during the pandemic and where the line falls between a game of skill and gambling. The engineering stayed in the background. A bug in a mobile game gets fixed with an update that users download overnight. A hardware failure can only be fixed by hand: Walk over to the machine, open the cabinet, swap the part. With hundreds of machines, any recurring breakdown becomes a permanent line item.

Iakimenko came to hardware from accounting. He graduated in economics in 2008 and went to work as an accountant and economist. Once he realized it wasn't for him, he switched careers, working first as a computer technician and then as a systems administrator. In November 2016, he moved to Israel. He had a family to support from day one, so he started working right away and studied Hebrew on the side. He completed a QA testing course. Then, while scrolling through job listings, he came across an opening: Gigantic was looking for a technician.

"I've been into technology and electronics since I was a kid. Numbers in reports never interested me the way what goes on inside a device does," Iakimenko says.

He started out in technical support and projects. Since March 2025, he has served as R&D lead technician, heading a team of four technicians who assemble, bench-test, install and maintain the machines. By his count, more than 350 machines have passed through his hands.

For the overheating claws, Iakimenko chose additional cooling and rolled it out across the machines. After that, the claws stopped failing.

"When a machine runs nonstop, every weak part eventually shows itself. The job is to find it before it stops the game," he says.

The next task had to do with how the warehouse itself worked. In April 2021, a Jerusalem Post reporter toured Clawee's warehouse and described an employee resetting the prizes inside a machine by hand after a game. That was standard practice back then. A won toy dropped through a chute, and the machine had to be restocked regularly. In a warehouse with hundreds of machines, that added up to constant routine work for the staff.

Iakimenko redesigned the setup. He built a win sensor directly into the playfield and installed a rotating platform beneath it. The system registers the win, and the toy goes back onto the playfield and gets mixed in with the others. The winner still receives a prize shipped from the warehouse, just as before. For players, the machine and the rules stayed the same, while manual restocking in the warehouse dropped. Today, all of the company's one-of-a-kind machines and most of its standard ones work this way.

An off-the-shelf machine is built for an arcade. According to Fast Company, Gigantic started out with ready-made machines and later switched to its own. Iakimenko was part of that shift: The company began building machines in its own cabinets with its own modifications, and assembly got faster.

The core of each machine is the control board. Iakimenko designed it himself and wrote its firmware. The board drives the motors and sensors, enforces the claw's travel limits and brings the machine back online after a fault. The whole system is built around it: A Linux computer, USB cameras, a video stream and a web interface that carries a tap on the player's phone all the way to the claw. As R&D lead technician, he is responsible for making these parts work as one system, and for remote diagnostics. The team can catch some faults without walking over to the machine.

"Players see only the picture and the button. If anything lags between the tap and the claw's movement, they'll decide the game is unfair," Iakimenko says.

Then there are machines you won't find in any catalog. A standard machine can be ordered from a manufacturer. A game with its own mechanics has to be built from scratch. Someone has to design the rules, build the cabinet, lay out the electronics, write the code and connect it all to the app. Working with his team, Iakimenko developed the electronics and code for machines called Scales, Dragon and Frog.

He built Submarines on his own, from the concept and design to the electronics, code and animation. Only the claw remains from the classic toy crane. Its movement is synced with an on-screen animation, and a precise drop of the claw counts as a hit on a submarine.

The same approach came in handy when the company automated its online lotto and marble race machines. Iakimenko connected them to the system and developed their control boards and electronics.

Devices that have to run for long stretches with no one around are needed far beyond gaming. Israeli start-up Kotleak is developing an industrial ultrasonic leak detector and brought Iakimenko in as an outside specialist to improve the prototype. The device used to hold a charge for about a day. Now it runs up to 20 days without recharging. Its communication range grew from about 10 meters to more than 30. He then built four working units for Kotleak, which are now being piloted at an industrial facility.

"Same job as in the warehouse: The device has to work when there's nobody around," Iakimenko says.

Next, Iakimenko wants to build a platform for interactive entertainment. It would make physical games faster to build, and people could play them both in person at the machine and online.

For now, back at the warehouse in Petah Tikva, a toy drops onto the rotating platform once more. Somewhere in Canada or Japan, a player presses a button without thinking about who builds and fixes these machines.

This article was written in cooperation with Aleksandr Iakimenko