Yazino founder Hussein Chahine on the key future trends social casino operators must be aware of to stay ahead of the game
Everyone can see how quickly technology is progressing, which makes talking about the future of gaming particularly exciting. To predict what’s next for gaming, however, it’s interesting to first look at how the industry has evolved in the last seven years.
The free-to-play social gaming industry really took off in the mainstream in 2007, largely thanks to Facebook’s platform offering both free social tools that provided almost exponential viral acquisition and virtually unrestricted audience reach at the time. All of a sudden, game developers who had been completely unheard of before – and who were publishing really uninspiring single-player, asynchronous games – sprang to prominence, boasting MAUs in the hundreds of millions. The golden opportunity for game developers was obvious.
The times they are a-changin’
Fast forward to 2011 and it was amazing how things had changed. Hundreds of start-ups had emerged and were all fighting for the same players. The technological ability to constantly improve upon and instantly release a game in iterative pieces, in stark contrast to past annual or bi-annual publishing cycles, meant that developers were shipping new features to players once or twice a week to keep them engaged and spending money in their games. The competition had increased, and the quality bar had risen dramatically.
Not only were games being created and iterated upon at an unprecedented rate, but players were demanding that they could play them anytime, anywhere on their smartphones and tablets. And, of course, we see today that developers are adopting a ‘mobile-first’ approach as a standard. At the same time, as the social networking revolution took hold of our culture, how we socialise online evolved, going from providing platforms for sharing statuses and photos, to offering up services more focused on discovery, search and messaging.
What is happening today is that people want to connect with others and enjoy shared experiences, which technology makes possible, and which is a trend that smart game developers should pay attention to. Console games like Wii and Xbox embraced this concept early on. They pushed the technological boundaries several years ago by replacing joysticks with kinetics, thereby literally changing the game by enabling players to share and immerse themselves in fun social experiences.
An interconnected world
Younger players, who are our future gamers and customers, are accustomed to this type of game interaction, having never really lived through the old days of the handheld controllers that seem so outrageously archaic in hindsight. Social games played on smartphones and tablets provide a very similar shared experience now. I expect that very soon we’ll be seeing a new breed of social games that utilise a combination of kinetics and virtual reality experiences like those provided by Oculus Rift.
The landscape for developers is also changing, and social casino in particular is now flooded with new, mostly undifferentiated companies. The social casino category is one of the best performing in the social gaming industry, and game developers – like Electronic Arts and Zynga – are getting involved by building studios specifically focused on this vertical.
I started Yazino a few years ago with the idea of connecting players and creating shared experiences through games. Today, I believe that vision is still what defines the future of gaming. A few other trends I see taking hold in the social space are that successful games are more and more becoming multiplayer, immediate, networked enabled, allow for meeting and chatting with new like-minded people, and are of course, cross-platform.
These new synchronous games where people play together, rather than alone or turn-based on a social network, is a big change to look out for. Synchronous games make sense when you consider why people play games – they want to meet, socialise with each other, compete in real-time and enjoy a varied, rewarding experience. This has been the motivation for playing games for thousands of years.
Technological advancements
The technological capability to create these synchronous, multiplayer experiences efficiently is what is going to make or break game developers in the future. At Yazino, we have historically focused on R&D, meaning building a scalable synchronous game engine, proof of concept games, marketing analytics and platform distribution.
This is the opposite approach of most game developers, who typically start with mechanics and graphic development. We took this industrialised approach to games – building the technological components required to deliver shared gaming experiences first and adding content second – because it speeds game development time, creates significant cost efficiencies, and allows us to now focus solely on creating high-quality, high-concept game content.
Yazino as a company has been lucky in that our vision to connect players and provide completely new, synchronous game experiences sets it apart from the competition. Next year we’re planning to build mini studios, either independently or through partnerships, that let us apply our proprietary platform to new game categories like sports, skill games and social games. We believe powering those games with our vision and technology will provide a much more immersive experience for players and is a great opportunity for both Yazino and potential partners.
