Playsino CEO Alex Kelly on the latest trends in the social casino sector and how he plans to take the firm to the next level
Social Casino Intelligence (SCi): What are some of the biggest trends you’ve seen in the social casino space since the start of your involvement in the sector?
Alex Kelly (AK): The biggest trend was the growth of the freemium monetisation model on virtually all platforms. Instead of people going out and buying a packaged game or subscription for their console or PC, it’s a way of receiving a pay-as-you-go experience. This was really a game-changer for casual gaming. The rise of mobile has also been huge. It has made gaming ubiquitous.
Technology is facilitating a lot of this. The ability to do cloud serving of content and distributing through multiple platforms has opened up the opportunity for entrepreneurs and small companies to be truly global businesses. Being global means dealing with local payments, taxes, distribution deals, and changing regulations to mention a few. Now, our partners have established an ecosystem where we focus on high quality content and they manage the rest.
SCi: How has Bingo World grown so quickly in such a short space of time?
AK: Playsino is something of a contrarian as we’re not going into the open market and buying many customers. We believe that a good product should grow naturally. We are at the point where our games are very polished and players are getting excited and telling their friends to join. The more people officially “like” your game, share with friends and give high ratings, the more you naturally rise up the search rankings and get discovered by new players. We put a lot of emphasis against sharing features, adding new content, and the design of the user interface to improve the overall experience.
SCi: How do you plan to maintain this current strong growth?
AK: One of the key things is retention. Acquiring players is hard. To grow you need to keep them happy so that they keep coming back. We do that by creating a great experience when they first get there and then constantly adding new content to all of our games in the form of new themed rooms with varying game rules. In Bingo World, we create themed experiences for each holiday to keep things interesting. This really resonates with our audience. Holiday Bingo is a separate game on mobile and Bingo USA has a completely different look and feel.
One thing we have done to differentiate ourselves from most players in the market is to create a scalable back-end where most of the game experience happens on our servers. This is the reason we are able to have broad distribution across every device. We’re live on Facebook, AOL, Yahoo, all iOS devices, all Android devices including Nook and Kindle, as well as distribution partners across Latin America and Asia.
SCi: Do you have big plans for the Latin American and Asian markets?
AK: Our product is in multiple languages already and the partnerships we are putting in place are strategic on a market-by-market basis. We go to each market, find who has the largest, most relevant existing user base and do channel arrangements whereby they do the marketing for us for a revenue share.
SCi: Do you have any other distribution deals in the pipeline?
AK: All of the distribution I just described was enabled by the fact that we created our product to be very server side and scalable across as many titles as we want. We’re now in a position where we can put out new types of experiences to new people, of which Bingo USA is just one example. We are in the process of building a branded game that is a variant of bingo with new mechanics to draw out a completely new experience. Our partners are some of the most recognisable companies in entertainment, internet and consumer electronics. This will be an exciting new experience for the whole family.
SCi: Is your growth skewed towards one gaming platform in particular?
AK: No. Our distribution is really across the board. We are platform agnostic by design. We are skewed more towards Facebook at this point. We love the scale and efficiency of their platform. We will continue to focus there but we see enormous growth in mobile and newer game ecosystems like Yahoo! Games.
SCi: Does Playsino have plans to expand into new verticals?
AK: As I mentioned before, we are developing new variants of our core games and partnering with major entertainment brands to extend our product breadth. In addition, we are planning tests of new content verticals into our existing games now.
SCi: You recently signed a deal with Dover Downs Casino. Do you expect to sign more land-based partnerships in the future?
AK: It worked out well and we’re finding that it’s a great marketing tool for them. However, we are focusing our energy more on our core bingo products now. As a start-up, you need to carefully choose where to spend your scarce resources.
SCi: What major trends do you expect to see in the social casino market going forward?
AK: The biggest trend now is that user acquisition costs are almost irrational. When companies are spending $8 or $9 to buy a player, there’s not a lot of margin left. Furthermore, it’s getting harder to scale in general. It takes a lot more time, innovation and money to get there, but once you do things are a lot easier.
SCi: How is Playsino attempting to meet such a difficult challenge?
AK: We’re putting out a series of third-party brand-ed games driven by our platform. This lowers our user acquisition costs and provides access to existing databases of potential players instead of risking an upfront investment for user acquisition. We are also doing innovative distribution deals with partners that have large pools of potential players. We provide incremental means of monetisation from their existing user base, thereby creating win-win situations.
