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Fantasy developers join the (bwin)party
IGT’s acquisition of Doubledown Casino late last year was a watershed moment for Hooplo’s Rob Stephenson but as he explains, it could be some time before the social and real-money gambling worlds converge completely
> By Rob Stephenson > Sales director, Hooplo Media
most gambling operators where they have never previously been able to reach an audience that has not outwardly shown signs they are interested in gambling – whether it is sportsbook, poker or casino. Working together However, enlightened gambling operators have understood that there are ways to use social games as an acquisition tool for predisposed gamblers. It is one of the immediate solutions social platforms can deliver to gambling operators. I have seen technology solutions being acquired by operators that sit ‘in’ or ‘across’ social games and can ?lter by age, geo-targeting, sex, interests and other key metrics. The reason I know this is that we are integrating one of those tech packages here at Hooplo for some of our games. These acquisitions have not hit the headlines or been trumpeted by gambling operators, but they are arguably more signi?cant acquisitions in the short term. So, will fantasy and social come to gambling or vice versa? No, we will meet in the middle in the short term and work out how and where we go in the longer term – together.
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here has been a lot of speculation about the coming of social gaming and whether it is a panacea for the gambling community, as well as exactly how one of the largest realmoney 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 and it has also opened up new distribution channels and audiences for its gambling products. But its ‘price of disruption’, which could amount to as much as US$500m, might yet be seen to be cheap. Cast your mind back to when a number of companies turned their noses up at now popular Facebook game Bejeweled, feeling it was overpriced at $40,000.
growing in revenue and players. I have been watching these pseudo-gambling games for some time and over the past 18 months I’ve been talking and listening to operators and senior real-money gaming executives; mainly to ascertain their needs and wants. I agree with a ge nerally accurate article by Al Glasser on Inside Social Games recently that states: “The only real point of convergence social and gambling games can hope for in 2012 is reducing cost per acquisition.”
Gaining momentum 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 pseudogambling but it’s a genre massively
Social games developers and gambling operators need to work closely together and share data points and gameplay mechanics
A good social game developer of any genre will know its audience inside out and can therefore be engaged to ?lter or de?ne 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
BIO
Rob Stevenson is sales director of social games publisher Hooplo Media. He moved into the social gaming sector in 2008 when he joined Digital Chocolate as sales director for the UK and Republic of Ireland, having previously worked for video games developer Ubisoft.
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