Andrew Hughes, co-founder and chief executive of AbZorba Games, discusses the company’s recent successes and real-money ambitions
Social Casino Intelligence (SCi): AbZorba has had a successful spell and has reached a few significant milestones lately, what do you put that success down to?
Andrew Hughes (AW): I think the underlying suc-cess of AbZorba has been an absolutely intense focus on building quality games, and in particular multiplayer quality games. I’ve found that gamers are becoming ever more acutely sensitive to quality and we’ve always had that as a mantra from day one. Speed of gameplay, robustness, and an environment that they particularly like has all helped to attract, engage, and most importantly, retain gamers.
SCi: How much of a signal was topping the iTunes chart in the US?
AW: It’s obviously every game studio’s desire to get to number one, particularly in their genre. We were number one in casino games for a partnership we had with Tango, and that’s been a very interesting addition to our B2B model. I think it’s very important to reach that, and we’ve seen from there gamers have come to us and, more importantly, gone to our other games and this is partly how we’ve achieved two million plus gamers. We have a platform that encourages cross-promotion from one game to another within our Hub of Fun Casino, and we allow gamers to build their own avatars in a unique avatar builder so they get to dress up and be the character and the personality they want. That’s something
we’re building up a much bigger library of right now. It’s totally unique, it’s not just an icon, you actually build a character.
SCi: How does the interaction between players work?
AW: You get to chat, to explore and to play with other gamers in real time around the table, and if a hottie comes on then you can send them a cocktail and say hi, the usual social etiquette applies. I think that’s the element of socialness which we think is what a social casino app should be about. It’s not just plugging into the social networks like Twitter, it really is allowing the gamer themselves to be at the absolute epicentre of the social activity. They in turn will take that to their own social group, perhaps they’ve got 60, 100 or 250 friends, and if we can find ways to encourage them to bring people into the app from their own little network, not just because they’ve broadcasted it on a Facebook page, then we see this really helping in terms of making the game a lot of fun to play with.
SCi: You mention the partnership with Tango, how important has that been to help drive traffic to your games?
AW: It’s not been absolutely instrumental in driving two million, we’ve been around for a lot longer than that. The reason why Tango and AbZorba have partnered is that Tango look for best of breed games in their new model, and we look now to leverage our B2C success, our expertise in social and our titles themselves with a B2C marketing strategy. A branded distribution works very well. Tango has a distribution of some 150 million install base, and we have content that they can use to leverage that install base and monetise them in a very clever way. People who install the app have 50, 60 or 100 friends which they will connect with around the app and communicate with using their free video calls. The way to monetise that is to invite your friends to play that game over that platform as well.
SCi: Would you look to do more branded deals?
AW: For us it makes a great deal of sense and we’re very actively looking at ways to do branded distribution, and we’ve opened up a number of conversations with the egaming world as well, who are very keen to explore social and mobile. We are very open to looking at leveraging very strong brands who want to engage what we have and they can’t build. They can’t build this phenomenal game set that we’ve spent two and a half years building, it’s too expensive, time consuming and risky for them to dip into because it’s not their core competency, whereas it is ours. They have a brand that we can leverage across marketing structures and databases. It’s a win-win for both parties, and that’s why AbZorba is very open to looking at those partnerships.
SCi: Do AbZorba have any plans to go into real-money gaming at all?
AW: Everything’s on the table, metaphorically and realistically. We’re very keen to explore how we do that and we have some interesting discussions going on right now. Equally it’s not our core competency – obviously one has to be very careful how you approach that – but absolutely, the AbZorba brand and our expertise and certainly some of our gamers are very keen to explore how that crossover will work. Part of what we want to do with the egaming community is to look at providing social games under the egaming brands to explore all sorts of CRM, marketing, retention conversations that are going on and even crossover into potential real-money conversion, so almost like an affiliate tool. I think social has a real part to play for egaming in that egaming needs to be more social and the element of not gambling doesn’t preclude them from actually wanting to have similar casino game experiences for fun and not actually spending any money. Why not have a dialogue that continues all month, not just near pay day? We think our social games can play a strong part in that equally, and it would help us to understand that market a bit more.
That’s the long answer, the short answer is yes, we would like to explore with the right partners how to get into real money gaming.
SCi: Your forte at the moment is very much casino games, do you have any plans to diversify?
AW: Certainly we have enough assets right now to keep us busy for some time to come, but as we expand the business and become more and more successful, it gives us more flexibility to look at different areas. We want to be the best at what we do, we don’t want to just add on things for the sake of it. I think sports betting is a great opportunity, but I don’t think anyone’s nailed it. If we were going to do something proper in that we would look at our expertise in multiplayer scenarios, and we’d work out how that would be. I think location-based stuff could play a very important part in that as well, I think that’s an opportunity yet to be explored by the industry.
SCI: And what can we expect from AbZorba in the coming months?
AW: We have mini-games coming through into the games. The games themselves are evolving constantly, and this is what gamers expect of us. We very much like to evolve the games on a continual basis. We have scratch and match inside the games now, mini-games are very important these days. They’re a break from the tables, and that’s something gamers want to do. We will be working with Income Access on their new social gaming platform which is great fun, and really maps a lot of the crossover between real-money and social gamers. We think there is a correlation, so let’s all explore how that can work. There are also some very interesting left-field, out of the box partnerships that we have coming up before Christmas. That’ll be a very interesting one, I think it’s probably a first. There is another partnership which we have that will be coming out from the US, but will be global. It will be a game changer for us, and I think you’ll understand why when you read about that. Watch this space, we are not just standing still in social games. There’s a lot going on that gives us new avenues of revenue, new avenues of access and new avenues of distribution. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun as this. If we look at the kind of activities we’re doing on a daily basis, it would fill most people’s year.