/ THE BRIEFING / NEWS
NO
YES
THE BIG DEBATE
THIS MONTH, WE ASK:
HAS THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL FEATURES IN REAL-MONEY
CASINO AND POKER BEEN EXAGGERATED?
MARTIN STALROS
MARKUS AURALA
s Head of poker – operations, Unibet
s Head of casino, Betsson Group
O
ne day most online
casinos will have social
features, but then we will
not call them ‘social features’
but ‘hygiene factors’. I think
most casino professionals in
my network agree with this
but the question of what we
mean by ‘social features’
raises many more emotions.
The social features I see
in the market are not truly
social and relevant for the
customers. I don’t feel they
have so far enriched the customer experience enough to
change the game and justify
all the hype. I also have a
hard time seeing whether
they can evolve to what they
should be unless we manage
to change certain things
within our industry. So, yes,
my view is that the importance of social features in
casino has been exaggerated.
To change the game we
need to take a holistic view.
This means we stop planting
individual social features on
specific sections of our sites
or in a subset of games in
W W W. E G R M A G A Z I N E . C O M
our portfolios. No matter
what the social features are,
they need to cover the whole
customer lifecycle which
means more than just playing
games.
Casino operators are
already struggling to create
seamless user experiences
from the components coming from different suppliers.
If we look at the games
alone, there are many kinds
of toolbars, conflicting uses
of terminology, incompatible
bonus functionalities and
so on.
It is next to impossible to
provide the customers with
general instructions on how
to play video slots. When
adding implementations of
social features to the picture,
the user experience will be
even more inconsistent.
Instead of each supplier going its own way and
expecting operators to
promote their games or take
advantage of their proprietary APIs, the operators need
open solutions.
T
he short answer is no –
but we need to define
what ‘social features’ really
means. Social gaming has had
great success and it would be
very narrow-minded to not try
to learn from it.
Social features are more
than Facebook and social networks. Social features include
(but are not limited to) user
experience, gamification, retention strategies and the agility to constantly add exciting
content to the game. These
are all areas where social
gaming firms have excelled
and the gambling industry has
room for improvement.
Social games are remar