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Absolute Casino — Social Media and Gaming

October 23, 2009

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Absolute Gaming - Social Media and Casino

I’ve been in the eGam­ing indus­try on a num­ber of lev­els and in a num­ber of capac­i­ties for 7.5 years now, a life­time in that sec­tor. Over the past cou­ple of years specif­i­cally it has become increas­ingly clear that the indus­try is com­pletely stag­nant from a prod­uct per­spec­tive. I were to specif­i­cally look at the fol­low­ing major chan­nels: Sports, Casino, and Poker you can see some inno­va­tion there.

Sports: the intro­duc­tion of live bet­ting and inter­act­ing with cus­tomers through social media (not spam­ming them) has grown the indus­try some­what. Per­son­ally I enjoy “In Game” Betting.

Poker: arguably this is the most social and pro­gres­sive of the chan­nels. Since poker is com­mu­nity based there a a num­ber of inter­est­ing inno­va­tions that have taken place but as for pur “inno­va­tion” it’s still Texas Hol­dem with­out a ton of inno­v­a­tive build outs to that strat­egy and prod­uct development.

Casino: this is the stag­nant sec­tor. The tra­di­tional “money suck­ing machine” of the indus­try the com­pet­i­tive land­scape is filled with less than rep­utable (trust me) off­shore oper­a­tors who hold their con­cepts of slow pay­outs, shady tac­tics and ques­tion­able mar­ket­ing very near and dear to their hearts.

There are a num­ber of rea­sons that this sec­tor has not inno­vated from lack of reg­u­la­tions (pro­mot­ing own­ers with crim­i­nal his­to­ries to main­tain a fairly decent oper­a­tion) to soft­ware providers who do not inno­vate their prod­ucts or ser­vices which will always impact the mar­ket­ing (if you haven’t got any­thing but another Casino Bonus to pro­mote then what are you *really* selling?)

Well I ran into Absolute Casino today and was very impressed. The actual site on reg­is­tra­tion is clearly in a test­ing phase but the con­cept is fan­tas­tic (it’s actu­ally excit­ing — which is new for me espe­cially in the past cou­ple of years). A social net­work aware mul­ti­player casino with Face­book integration.

This is bril­liance and some­thing I per­son­ally have pitched to pre­vi­ous con­sult­ing clients. The prob­lem they have is paral­y­sis, every­thing is so com­fort­able for them at the moment that inno­va­tion has gone out the win­dow. There is also a level of arro­gance, sim­ply put — many oper­a­tors are com­pletely unwill­ing to invest the money and the resources into inno­v­a­tive products.

But if you look at Face­book, have a peek at the Poker, Casino and Gam­ing apps. There are hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple play­ing on a reg­u­lar basis. Mainly because Face­book makes it social, I’m not down­load­ing some soft­ware client and click­ing on a video slot machine. The inter­ac­tion is the thing that makes this extremely unique.

I look for­ward to check­ing out the final prod­uct in a month or two. It should be very cool and could poten­tial be a dis­rup­tive force in the world of eGam­ing. I hope so. The indus­try sim­ply is no longer inter­est­ing and it is clearly being left behind, with it’s head stuck in the sand.

But it’s nice to know I am not alone in this point of view. Hus­sein Chahine who is the founder of Advanced Gam­ing Labs (and Absolute Casino) has it dead to rights:

“I have been a tech­nol­ogy provider to the gam­ing and bet­ting indus­try for the past five years and it became clear to me that the indus­try has stopped inno­vat­ing. The tech­nol­ogy sup­pli­ers are too removed from the con­sumer, while the oper­a­tors are falling short of under­stand­ing and build­ing a busi­ness that embraces today’s social-networked inter­net world. This has pre­sented a unique oppor­tu­nity for us to enter the mar­ket as a new gam­ing com­pany, where mil­lions of con­cur­rent play­ers are empow­ered to con­nect [and] compete.”

This should be of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to any affil­i­ates out there who are mak­ing money from the tra­di­tional model. The days for these sites are num­bered unless there is inno­va­tion, have a look at the next gen­er­a­tion of gam­ing providers and set your­self up for shifts in the indus­try. Being left behind is the worst danger.

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Written by Dan Nedelko · Filed Under Features, gambling 

Comments

12 Responses to “Absolute Casino — Social Media and Gaming”

  1. Peter Graham on October 24th, 2009 3:00 am

    Nice arti­cle Dan,
    We’re look­ing at other avenues we can go down. The trick is trans­fer­ring social media play­ers into cash depositers. I agree the Casino mar­ket is pretty tired, but you haven’t men­tioned the big increase in online Bingo, par­tic­u­laly pop­u­lar in the UK

  2. Dan Nedelko on October 24th, 2009 10:00 am

    @Peter

    Thanks Peter — I agree it can be a bit of a trick to con­vert social media play­ers into cash play­ers. It cer­tainly requires a longer term approach to mar­ket­ing efforts than a direct acqui­si­tion mar­ket­ing model. I firmly believe that social media play­ers can be con­verted although the demo­graphic is dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent. These are “retail” play­ers who will have a lower ini­tial and recur­ring deposit amount but given a solid prod­uct, cus­tomer ser­vice, reten­tion ben­e­fits and ongo­ing engage­ment should have a sig­nif­i­cantly longer Life­time Value (LTV).

    I pur­posely didn’t address the bingo mar­ket specif­i­cally since I have not had first hand expe­ri­ence in that par­tic­u­lar ver­ti­cal. I agree it is see­ing big increases in the eGam­ing mar­ket and I’m watch­ing that area with interest.

    Thanks for the comment!

  3. Jake Kahle on October 24th, 2009 1:02 pm

    How is Absolute’s model dif­fer­ent from Zynga’s poker games on Facebook?

  4. Dan Nedelko on October 26th, 2009 9:06 am

    Absolute casino is intro­duc­ing this ini­tially as a free play casino but has the infra­struc­ture in place to make it a real cash casino. Zynga pro­vides free play games for social net­works — it’s quite a bit different.

  5. furacoua on December 1st, 2009 10:00 pm

    I checked out Absolutely Casi­nos after read­ing this post, and I have to say that I like it. I didn´t think I was play­ing for social con­nec­tions but you made me start think­ing about it, and it´s true.

  6. Billy Kernow on January 15th, 2010 10:21 am

    Inter­est­ing arti­cle Dan. The num­ber of play­ers on many of Facebook’s games have cer­tainly seen a mas­sive increase in recent months. I read recently that the Zynga poker app is draw­ing over 16 mil­lion unique users per month, and as you say the fact that it’s easy (no down­load, no signup etc) and highly social (invit­ing friends, com­pet­ing with their friend’s scores cer­tainly seems to have dri­ven the num­bers up. There also seem to be a lot of new apps being cre­ated as other peo­ple try to “jump on the band wagon” and take a slice of the pie — but while there’s a crossover, it’s cer­tainly largely a dif­fer­ent demo­graphic as you say.

    I can also vouch for bingo being on the rise, I’ve noticed quite an increase in inter­est on my own sites, pos­si­bly due to some of the big UK com­pa­nies run­ning TV ad cam­paigns in recent months.

  7. Beth Charette on January 22nd, 2010 6:03 pm

    Yes, speak­ing of slow pay­outs, that was what got my Uncle. He was able to bank his win­nings before pay­out. As a result, the casino always lured him into another round and won back his old money before they actu­ally had to pay him anything.

    He never with­drew a dime, and spent tens of thou­sands (not a lot in their world) with them online.

    One other Uncle who had a lot of prob­lems with gam­bling ended up owing poker and gin “clubs” over $400,000. $300,000 at the FRIENDLY poker game which he attended for 20 years, and $100,000 for the gin club. He, of course, was play­ing with friends, includ­ing a famous movie star who finally asked my Uncle not to come back. He told my Uncle that it wasn’t any fun play­ing with him any more. Lucky for my Uncle he wasn’t in debt to the mob. As far as I know, at the time of his death, he still owed the gam­bling money, but his estate showed him to be so far in debt that nat­u­rally the poker and gin club tab will never be paid.

  8. Gratis Gokkasten on January 27th, 2010 7:09 am

    I also play often on Absolute Casino, its nice and smooth. but i think there alots more great casi­nos out there

  9. Funny on February 6th, 2010 8:34 pm

    I am amazed at how many gam­bling web­sites have popped up in the last 3 years.

  10. David on February 8th, 2010 4:43 am

    I’ve tried con­vert­ing play­ers from Zynga etc. on the social sites and in my expe­ri­ence most are not inter­ested. They are casual play­ers and very happy just play­ing for play money on Face­book. We put together an ebook a while ago teach­ing peo­ple how to eas­ily beat the Zynga game, and then pro­moted a cou­ple of poker sites on the back­end but con­ver­sions were very low. The only small results we did get were pro­mot­ing freerolls, but again not really enough to war­rant the effort IMO.

  11. Dan Nedelko on February 8th, 2010 2:18 pm

    @David I think the point of this post is about get­ting a bit more inte­gra­tion into Social Media through cus­tom devel­op­ment of you own appli­ca­tions directly into the plat­forms. I would agree that con­ver­sion from free play­ers to pay­ing cus­tomers is a big stretch from a Zynga appli­ca­tion. How­ever the are numer­ous unique angles which would allow you to fully inte­grate a mar­ket­ing strat­egy into an appli­ca­tion that would con­vert when speak­ing to the cor­rect audi­ence. I think that fun­da­men­tally you’re try­ing to climb the dif­fi­cult moun­tain of turn­ing a free and casual gamer into a pay­ing cus­tomer (basi­cally turn­ing one demo­graphic into another) rather than try­ing to attract poten­tial play­ers into your mar­ket­ing database.

  12. Evee on February 11th, 2010 6:07 am

    Haven’t tried it. I might now.

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