Social casino gambling grew into a $3.4 bln industry in 2016. In 2017 the market situation will only improve with $4.4 bln revenue to be expected, according to the data from Eilers Research. The overall gambling market is set to reach $91 bln, and the 4 percent social casino market share is a lucrative piece of the pie. Getting to know the latest trends for this year will help direct your investment goals, especially taking into account the software outsourcing market that is there to help gambling businesses reach out to new players on a short time-frame and budget.
The first place in social casino games trends takes the introduction of skill based game mechanics. It helps attract the millennial generation that focuses on skill gaming like e-sports, and daily fantasy sports betting, as well as the older customers that enjoy random chance games and would like to experience the social casino games. This combination lets gambling companies provide attractive features to both generations and help improve revenue. Such route provides a firm way to expand the demographics of social casino games in 2017 and onwards. We talked a lot about this issue in detail in our previous article “VR is a smart choice for gambling industry”, which we highly recommend you to advise.
Another point is the potential addition of live dealer gambling. This can help imitate the feel of a real casino, the real presence in gambling. It is an option with lots of potential as the live dealer feature has been reserved for high-end paying customers in real-money online gambling and its introduction to the social gambling may attract a large audience.
But it’s social casino gambling, and you may wonder if this option is too expensive to maintain. Many businesses that would like to enter the social casino industry misunderstand the value of customers. In reality, it has a fairly large and paying audience, which is willing to spend money but in a different way.
According to SuperData Research, the average age and gender of social casino gamblers is 36-41 years, and over 72% of it is comprised of females. And the younger auditorium is more attracted to mobile devices, and it is paying on average 4-10% more than the desktop gamers.
The prime sources of revenue with social gaming is in-app purchases and in-game advertising. It is clear that today the social casino games have great opportunities for creating a flow of money through traffic procurement and advertising. This traffic is quite versatile, and engagement can be generated both on the desktop and mobile casino versions of the game.
From the point of view of attracting new gamers to the social mobile casino, there will be even more marketing resources spent. Live streams, YouTube channel, Instagram videos, for example, are among the key resources. These efforts should be coupled with the ability to install the game on mobile, or social media platform. The options are pretty endless.
The main reason for streams to rival traditional sources of traffic purchasing is because gambling players traffic is quite expensive to get and the cost can sometimes reach totally insane dimensions. And in order to reduce these costs, online social gambling businesses will continue to look for opportunities to generate traffic via new ways, like streams.
Online social casinos in the Middle Eastern market are starting to get traction, although, taking into account the cultural specifics, real-money gambling has not always been welcome there. But social casino gambling is a very promising direction as it does not require direct money wagering. To get a firm footing in this market gambling companies need to develop some additional casino game mechanics that are popular there.
The legislation regarding the social casinos is not as strict there, and this adds another layer of benefit, as it attracts those real-money gamblers that have no option but to play social due to strict government rules.
The combination of real-money gambling and social gambling is on the rise. Operators in the market of real money online casinos have many ways to generate paying traffic, but these resources can also be well-spent on social gamers as well. Similarly, social gaming opens up new ways to attract customers via social media platforms, and this will make it possible for gambling operators to create a cyclical traffic, where people playing social casino games will convert to real money players and vice versa.
Therefore, we can expect a potential mixing of user-bases. But to achieve that, companies will have to attract more creative talent to develop software solutions that are attractive to real money players who decide to drop in on the social gambling, for example. Adjusting and adding recognizable templates, promotions and other relevant things, foresees the use of gaming software development outsourcing expertise to go through all of this workload. You can get to know more about gaming software outsourcing by following this link. Another beneficial point in the inter-linking of social and real-money gambling is in-game cross-promotion. This lets companies attract paying customers from various networks, at a lower cost.
Real money social casino games are based on the fact that real money is invested, and users can receive real money as their winnings. And there is very strong, good quality and elaborated regulatory policy to support it that includes both regional policies, and the probability of winnings per user. All of this is governed by state rules and laws.
So why is social gambling much more attractive? The main reason is that the regulatory policies it operates under are governed not by countries, but by the platforms themselves. There’s no such thing like needing to adhere to some kind of legalization or getting approved by specialized government bodies on the loss probabilities as the winnings have no real monetary value, except for pleasure for the fans. This means that in the social casino gambling all that you win is purely for fun. It has no financial value – you cannot withdraw any winnings.
Accordingly, it is not regulated. No matter what you do with your game, like dropping or increasing the rate of winnings, neither you nor the player will not lose anything. The only thing that matters is the level of fun from the process – gamers will either like it or on the contrary will not like to play. Therefore, contrary to real money operators there are no real limitations, and this helps boost the introduction of new game types and improve growth like nothing else.