GameHouse’s Ken Murphy discusses the challenge of transitioning from casual gaming to social casino
Social Casino Intelligence (SCi): Do you feel that casual gaming companies have struggled to reinvent themselves to effectively compete against social-only operators?
Ken Murphy (KM): I think that it’s very difficult to point to any competitor that has the full package, as I think we all brought a lot of different things to the table. For example, we have a lot of casual gaming expertise, and an understanding of what it means to try and engage a social casual player. Where we’ve had to do a lot to catch up is the focus on the hardcore casino gaming side – it took a while to find the people who really understand the maths, and how that affects the experience.
Having this experience has made a big difference – getting the right expertise into our slot games almost doubled our ARPDAU, just by changing the maths models in the games with no other alterations.
I happen to believe that there is a range of expertise that anybody who is going to be successful in this space has to incorporate into what they are doing. And that said, I think the fact that you can be more experienced in one aspect than another provides a form of differentiation and helps a range of offerings appeal to different people within the core demographic.
SCi: Has it been a struggle to develop slot games, which by nature offer fairly solitary gameplay when your background is in games which tend to offer a more interactive experience?
KM: When you walk around a casino you see a lot of solitary gameplay intermingled with social experiences. Some games are inherently more social than others – if you walk to the craps table there is a ton of activity going on, and a lot of interaction between people who are playing and those who are watching, but if you walk to the slots you see more examples of people playing alone. Yet in the real world you are seeing changes there, with the grouped machines and competitive or cooperative play that signals a merging of the solitary and the social, so we’re starting to experiment and drop in social engagement features particularly in the GameHouse Casino product to see what starts to resonate. On certain products, like poker, the social experience is obvious. Bingo is a fascinating example, because when you take a look at a larger bingo experience, particularly when people are playing multiple cards and are in an auto-daub mode, it’s a passive experience so they’re engaging in social activities, and we’re looking for ways to strike those balances.
Things like showing which of your friends are playing, and reciprocal gifting and communication are a little bit subdued at the moment, but we’re going to experiment and A/B test like crazy to find out which of these really work with the players and as we refine them we’ll start to bring them to the fore.
SCi: You drew comparisons between social casino and land-based gaming – where do you see egaming fit with these two sectors?
KM: You can break the way this industry is emerging into three chunks. You can take a look at the land-based world and what that brings to the table, and you can say that it’s the foundational experience – it’s the established sector that provides a benchmark for all of us.
The egaming side that has converted some of that experience into the online world, but I think it’s an interesting observation that the social and online gambling sectors aren’t as linked in the same way that social and land based, or land-based and online are. That could be simply be because as the companies have grown up and developed their offerings they have initially placed their bets about where they are going to perform.
Those that have decided they are going to operate in the markets where online gambling is not legal have decided to stay hyper-focused on those markets, and I think the egaming world has done the same for the regulated territories.