Friday view: What we've learnt so far
Mr Green CEO Mikael Pawlo discusses his firmâs first forays into mobile and what it has learnt so far
It might be a tad early to draw big conclusions, but it is evident that mobile is an important channel. We believe that the casino market has been slow in mobile adaptation as such, since the games have all been in Flash and thus not working on iOS. But since all new games are now released in HTML5, the importance will increase vastly and the transition will be fast. I think if you are not stellar on mobile in 2015 your users might punish you and take their business elsewhere.
We are happy with the results, even though we don’t disclose the performance of each distribution platform. Over time, Mr Green needs to be in every relevant distribution platform where players want us to be. Since we are operating in Europe, all our markets are very geared towards mobile. I can’t think of any market that is not currently exploding on mobile.
We are building a real casino with great features for people who like to play casino games in a safe and entertaining environment. We have learned a lot from our ventures in social and we will use our knowledge to extend further features from it into our casino, but we also believe that there is some difference between free-to-play players and play for real-money players, and you need to respect that.
Since we started Mr Green we have regarded big data strategies – even if we didn’t refer to them as such at the time – as crucial for success. When I entered this industry some eight years ago, I was surprised to find that the online firms were worse than their land-based counterparts in using data for personalisation. Today, the situation is different and the industry is much more professionally managed, but still the need for business intelligence and data mining paired with personalised offering of both content and bonuses will set the good players in this market apart from the poor ones going forward. We hope and strive to be in the former category.
The complexity of building an online casino is increasing, but today I would say that supply problems have eased and all suppliers have a mobile strategy. It was a tad different around five years ago when we initiated our mobile project and couldn’t get hold of any games.