F E A T U R E S O C I A L S U C C E S S WA N T E D
Chili/and Winamax
Chili’s social integration began with the launch of Chiliconnect in April 2011, with the innovation allowing players to sell percentages of their action or make last-longer bets with the help of Facebook and Twitter accounts. The product was owned by the iPoker skin rather than the network on which it sat before merging its dot.com B2C poker arm with Poker770 this year. CEO Alex Dreyfus said at the time: “The link between Chilipoker players and the fact that you can speak to players is the most important part. Facebook is just the cherry on top of the cake.” In October, the operator took a more active approach with the introduction of US-facing social poker network Chiliplay, launched on Facebook as well as being made available on various desktop and smartphone devices. Chiliplay takes the freeplay model, targeted at the US among other markets, with director Rohin Malhotra describing it upon launch as “technically the most advanced on the market today”. It uses software from Winamax, developed by the operator in-house with Winamax CEO Canel Frichet suggesting it
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represents “the ?rst time such a high-quality network will be made available on Facebook”. More recently, Dreyfus admitted of Chiliconnect that “Chili is too small to use a tool like that and make it successful. We want to bring it on to a bigger scale with a bigger platform,” turning the operator’s focus towards its “iGaming Platform” which has since been sold to Bally Technologies, with a freeplay social poker site launched last month [May] with the branding of the platform’s ?rst partner, Golden Nugget, which also allows players to share results on their Facebook wall.
Gamesys
Gamesys was one of the early movers in the social space, but crucially also one of the ?rst to embrace Facebook, launching freeplay games on the platform as far back as 2009. Its ?agship product remains Jackpot Joy Slots launched in June 2011. Jackpot Joy Slots attracts 1.8m monthly actives on Facebook with Gamesys claiming that more than 6m people have played the game since its launch. The success of the social offering has seen Gamesys founder Noel Hayden launch a social gaming development subsidiary, iwi, to continue to grow the brand. Iwi has evolved into a B2B operation through its partnership with PopCap Games – sold to Electronic Arts for a rumoured $1.3bn in July last year – developing both real-money and social products. Most recently the companies collaborated on Lucky Gem Casino, a slotfocused Facebook offering, which AppData estimates to have attracted more than 1.3m monthly active players over the past month. Gamesys supplies PopCap with the social gaming platform for Lucky Gem, as well as customer service, product and IT solutions. However, all mention of iwi has disappeared from Gamesys’ sites, suggesting the division has been folded into the larger businesses. Aside from Jackpot Joy Slots, Jackpot Joy Casino, which offers roulette and blackjack alongside the slots offering, has only 190,000 monthly active users, and Super Fun Town, similar to Zynga’s FarmVille and CityVille, which launched in 2010, only attracts 5,000 monthly players.
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IGT
IGT has arguably made the most aggressive move to quickly establish a presence in the social gaming sector through its acquisition of Double Down Interactive for up to $500m in January this year. Paying such a hefty price for a business which is barely two years old represents a huge gamble for IGT, but also shows the company has a huge amount of faith in the Facebook platform. Double Down’s 5.3m monthly active users help draw in annual revenues of more than $10m, with the casino showing consistent growth. Player volume has increased by 13% since the beginning of the year – an increase which should continue after IGT announced plans to roll out a Double Down variant for mobile devices. Still, there have been signs of change; in an analyst call following the purchase of
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