Plumbee producer Dave Wright discusses his transition from real-money into social casino, and shares the insights he has gained from the sector so far.
When I told former colleagues at my previous company that I was joining Plumbee to help create slot games for the social environment, one of the replies that struck a chord with me was, “isn’t that like playing poker for matchsticks?”
As someone who had worked in real money gaming for the last 15 years, I struggled to come up with a response to this. It was an alien concept to me. Sure, I’d played for free on real money casino sites – I always try before I buy – but the concept of gambling without the possibility of winning anything tangible was a difficult one to get my head around.
Now I’m part of the rapidly expanding social gaming industry, it strikes me that the social casino users can be split into a few basic groups. Firstly, you have your “casino connoisseurs”, players who want as close to a true-life casino experience as they can get. Secondly, you have your “collectors”, players who are hungry for challenges, medals, trophies and similar in-app social features – a trait shared with the vast majority of the wider social games audience. Finally, you have your “leisure players”, users who enjoy slot machine mechanics and view social slots as pure entertainment; a way of passing the time.
Fulfilling the needs of all of these users requires you to tread a fine line between providing high-quality, authentic slots games and engaging social features that reward the user and add stickiness & longevity to the app. High quality slots are obviously the centrepiece of any social gaming application, but just offering straightforward free-to-play versions of your games won’t be enough to keep a user-base with so much choice coming back time and time again. It’s the social features that bring users back to your app. Social features are the glue holding the product together, elevating it from straightforward slots simulator to full-blown entertainment product.
One of the questions I thought long and hard about before I arrived at Plumbee was, “what is the difference between social and real-money players?” Is there one? In my experience, there is one key difference, a symptom of the cash vs free-to-play world; if someone was gambling £2 a spin and won £2,000, they would almost certainly withdraw some or all of that money and leave to play another day.
Social gamers, on the other hand, are more likely to up their bet and continue playing. Even if they don’t up their bet, they continue to play – there is no walkaway amount because there is no withdrawal.
When you factor this in to your app with regards to pricing for your coins/gems/whatever, you realise that the most important thing is to offer great value for money.
Purchasing items for social slots is in no way like staking a bet; to come back to the original analogy, it’s like putting down real cash to play poker with matchsticks! Rather, the transaction should be regarded the same as an item purchase in any other social game, be it cooking, farming, city-building or any of the other wide and diverse activities available to players in the social entertainment sphere.
You’re offering a premium experience via enhancements, benefits and compelling extra features that extend users’ enjoyment of your entertainment product.
As we see more slot apps coming to market, players will have more choice and, as is always the way, become pickier. Quality will become much more important than quantity as players’ expectations rise.
You can already see apps where the focus is on artwork, or apps where the focus is on social features. If you can deliver quality and balance the things that are important to people, you can be up there with the best of them. Concentrate on the wrong things, and you get lost in the mire of also-rans.