Opinion: Fantasy developers join the (Bwin)Party
IGT's acquisition of Doubledown Casino late last year was a watershed moment for Hooplo's Rob Stevenson but it could be sometime before the social and real-money gambling worlds converge completely.
Please pardon for the pun “ there’s been a massive amount of speculation about the coming of social and whether it’s a panacea for the gaming community, as well as exactly how one of the largest real-money operators will deliver a successful social strategy.
“Disruption” is an overused term, but I thought IGT’s acquisition of Doubledown Casino, a social gaming developer that has one of the most popular apps on Facebook, late last year was a watershed moment.
IGT now has internal, and valuable, data plus it has also opened up new distribution channels and audiences for its gambling products.
But its “price of disruption” at what could amount to as much as US$500m might yet be seen to be cheap. Cast your mind back to so long ago when a number of companies turned their noses up to now popular Facebook game Bejeweled feeling it was “overpriced” at US$40,000.
IGT has started a landslide and hardly a day goes by without a story about a gaming company partnering/acquiring/developing a social games company and/or platform; while each day also brings with it speculation about whether social games are a genuine solution or a dead end.
Today, only a few of the thousands of apps and games on social networks are casino, slots or more generally pseudo-gambling but it’s a genre massively growing in revenue and number of players.
I’ve been watching these pseudo-gambling games for some time and over the past 18 months I’ve been talking to and listening to operators and senior real-money gaming executives; mainly to ascertain what their needs and desires are.
I’m minded to agree with a generally accurate article by Al Glasser on Inside Social Games recently that in the short term at least, “The only real point of convergence social and gambling games can hope for in 2012 is reducing cost per acquisition.”
A good social game developer, of any genre will know their audience inside out and therefore can be engaged to filter or define which players have a latency or predisposition to gambling. For this to work social games developers and gambling operators need to work closely together and share data points and gameplay mechanics.
This predisposition is a blind spot for most gambling operators where they’ve never hitherto been able to reach an audience that hasn’t outwardly shown a sign that they are interested in gambling “ whether it is sports book, poker or casino.
However, enlightened gambling operators have understood that there are ways to use social games as an acquisition tool for predisposed gamblers.
It’s one of the immediate solutions social platforms can deliver to gambling operators. I’ve seen technology solutions being acquired by operators that sit “in” or “across” social games and can filter by age, geo-targeting, sex, interests and other key metrics.
The reason I know this is that we’re integrating one of those tech packages here at Hooploo for some of our games.
These acquisitions haven’t hit the headlines or been trumpeted by gambling operators, but they are arguably more significant acquisitions in the short term.
So, will fantasy and social come to gambling or vice versa? No, we’ll meet in the middle in the short-term and work out together how and where we go in the longer term … together.