iGaming Business magazine iGB 112 Sept/Oct 2018 | Page 35

Casino & Games
Improving
lifetime VALUE
Competition for consumers’ leisure time has never been so great. Åke André explains how
an ambitious studio can stand out from the crowd and optimise that all-important lifetime value
Åke André has more than 14 years of experience
in the online gambling industry. He is based
in Umeå, Sweden, where he lives with his two
children, and has been involved in several
successful start-ups. He is currently CEO of
Foxium, a company he co-founded with a few
other experts from the industry.
The igaming market has a bit of a content problem. More studios
than ever before are generating more games more quickly than ever
before – and it goes without saying that quality varies significantly
between them.
As a result, operators have become extremely selective about the
content they publish. Leading casinos choose only the best, most
suitable titles to add to their portfolios and only actively promote an
even smaller subset of those to their players.
Gone are the days when an operator’s selection of games
was judged on quantity. Today, casinos need to understand their
markets and curate the kind of content that draws and retains their
target player.
So how do operators make those decisions? Factors like theme,
brand recognition (particularly with licensed intellectual properties)
and features are obviously important, but maybe the single biggest
criterion is lifetime value, or LTV.
To put it bluntly, casinos want games that hold the attention
and maximise profit over time from the player. LTV is a way of
measuring that.
From a casino’s point of view, a good game is one with strong LTV
potential. And for studios who want their games to stand out from the
churn of content, this means designing with LTV in mind. There is
no one way to do this, but as a studio that values quality over quantity,
there are a few things Foxium always considers when designing a
new game that we believe will deliver strong LTV.
The journey matters as much as the destination
Real money gamers play to win, after all, but payouts are not always
frequent enough to hold their attention alone. A few operators, such
as Hero Gaming, have successfully captured the concept of player
progression and reward and have translated it into better LTV results,
and I believe studios need to do the same.
It might be interim, RTP-related rewards, operator-side
achievements like free spins or reloads, or a strong narrative thread
like the one we created for The Odd Forest, where players beat a
series of stages and then faced a boss fight.
Whatever the approach, it’s important to give players the sense that
they are always taking a step in the right direction. This is something
players will feel strongly in our upcoming release The Great Albini.
Choose your audience and pick your pace
Slot games should be designed with a target player in mind, and
everything from theme to mechanics to volatility profile should
follow. No single game should try to appeal to everyone. Imagine
a movie that wants to capture fans of Westerns, science-fiction,
horror, ro