Q&A: Patrick Southon, Gaming Realms CEO

Social casino might not create the same industry buzz it did three years ago but it remains a $3bn sector and egaming firms of various shapes and sizes are vying to get in on the action. AIM-listed Gaming Realms is one such company to go on the social acquisition offensive and on Friday announced it had acquired the popular Slingo brand and a number of other social casino assets from RealNetworks in a deal worth $18m.

The move came despite the company having scaled back its social gaming presence in recent months to focus on the development of its in-house real-money platform. So eGaming Review spoke to the London-based firm’s CEO Patrick Southon to find out more about the deal and how he thinks its new assets will also help propel its real-money business to new heights.

eGaming Review (eGR): Why have you made the move back into social gaming?

Patrick Southon (PS): It started with us licensing the real-money Slingo game from RealNetworks and its president of games Atul Bali has also been on the board for a while. Since we launched it in April, Slingo very quickly became one of our most popular games and fits with our strategy completely of getting unique content to deliver on mobile. RealNetworks spent time launching social assets after cancelling its deal with Zynga and we just saw the metrics which all seemed really promising. We pulled away from social to focus on our real-money platform but we still had a lot of confidence and faith in it when you get it right.

eGR: What’s so attractive about the Slingo brand?

PS: We’ve seen how powerful this brand is for real-money and it does exactly what we’ve been trying to do which is cross-over between social and real-money gambling. We’ve seen that when we advertise a real-money offering to a Slingo social player it reduces our cost per acquisition (CPA) by about 30%. It just seemed to be a perfect opportunity. The other amazing thing about Slingo is that bingo’s a tough thing to get to work on mobile but it works perfectly in the Slingo format on a touchscreen on virtually any size. From a strategic perspective we get the Slingo real-money app licence which means we don’t have to pay any more money on that, as well as a social business which is just starting to grow really well on its own.

eGR: What will be Atul Bali’s role as a result of the deal?

PS: We bought the assets off RealNetworks and formed a new company called Blastworks in USA which Atul will head up to deliver their existing business plan. Blastworks will be the social division of Gaming Realms and will hold the licences for Slingo. Atul will also come onto the company board as deputy chairman which is great because he’s obviously got lots of experience in the sector.

eGR: Do you see yourselves becoming as much a social gaming company as an RMG firm in the future?

PS: I think they’re the same thing. It was an interesting time getting our business intelligence guys who looked at the data of the Slingo player base with our own as they found that they’re exactly the same type of person. They fit the same demographic and even the revenues you get from them aren’t too dissimilar. This whole notion of social versus real-money comes historically from the fact that there’s two different industries doing the same thing. The really exciting thing for us is we can start operating in the space between the two and use data to target people, cross-promote, and upsell them – all the things people talked about but haven’t managed to do yet.

eGR: How is Spin Genie performing on your new platform?

PS: The product is performing amazingly well and our quarter-on-quarter growth is fantastic. We’ll continue to push that more aggressively now we’ve got this deal out of the way and we can focus on building it even more. It’s nice to have a product which monetises well and acquires players at a very low CPA which is pretty hard in this environment and it’s changing rapidly with new features coming out all the time. [Gaming Realms CMO] Simon Smiley is undertaking a new branding exercise for the product currently which will probably launch in the final quarter. We’ve also got an advert for Spin Genie about to air in early August which emphasises the fact that Slingo is available exclusively on Spin Genie.

eGR: Will you be looking to add any more companies to the Gaming Realms portfolio?

PS: We’re trying to buy businesses which give us the ability to scale our own products faster. Slingo is a valuable brand which helps us do that and also to acquire social players in international markets where we haven’t gone in with our gambling platforms. We would look to acquire other businesses which have areas and skills we don’t have but we’re not really into the Stride model where you just buy revenue because we think our platform can scale so we’re trying to buy businesses which can help that scale.