Winning the Social Gambling War

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

by kScope guest contributor
Tyler York, Marketing and Customer Development, Betable

It’s becoming clear that casino games are the next big social game genre.

Take a look at the image above, provided by Kontagent. Casino games are surpassing farm games as the darlings of social networks: The growth of monthly active users (MAUs) for farm games is slowing, while that of social casino games is generating higher revenues–seven times, to be precise–than the casual games category.

Furthermore, with downward pressure on Facebook’s stock from its falling revenues, it’s become increasingly likely that it will soon allow real-money gambling on its platform. Couple that with evidence that legislation may open up parts of the U.S. market to online gambling, and you have a perfect storm forming that game developers would be foolish to ignore. Continue Reading…

Finding the “Whales” of Your Game

Author icon Owen Martin|Comments icon 3

Let’s say you’re developing a game and you want to see who your most profitable players are. Imagine you’ve got a power-law so heavy-tailed you don’t even have a mean. You want to estimate your shape parameter and your statistics are all over the place as expected (no pun intended). Looks like you’re going to have to chop off that long tail and treat it separately. Looks like you’re going whale hunting.

In the casino industry, so-called “high-rollers” are often referred to as whales. It’s easy to see why: while they might come in with an attitude of being able to beat the house by wagering enough money, ultimately they wind up providing the biggest payouts to the casino. A somewhat disparaging term, to be sure, but it’s easy to understand how casinos view their revenue stream: lots of small change with the occasional big kill. Continue Reading…

Jogonaut CEO on Using Data-Driven Game Design to Acquire High-Value Players

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

Jogonaut is a social gaming company. Its debut title, OJO AGENT, is aimed at mid-core gamers who are predominantly male ages 21 to 39. In OJO AGENT, players act as sports agents who must pitch and sign real athletes as clients. The game is built using HTML5 and serves as both an interactive platform for players to enjoy a social sports game and a marketing platform for some of the world’s biggest brands.

We spoke with Jogonaut Founder and CEO Barry Carpe on the importance of data-driven design, and how he’s using analytics to continually provide the best user experience to his players. He also shared some great game marketing and development tips. Continue Reading…

Hacker Perspectives on Understanding In-App User Behaviors

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

by kScope guest contributor
Garrett Wilkin, Freelance Writer at ProgrammableWeb

AngelHack brings together start-up communities from around the country; participants build start-up ideas. The competition is judged by top angel investors.

I attended AngelHack in Boston over the weekend of March 3. My primary goal was to talk to developers about analytics. I wanted to see how many had heard of the new potential for deeper analysis of user behavior from service providers like Kontagent. Some of my questions included:

  • How were they thinking about user behavior, if at all? Had they already decided that analytics was important?
  • If so, which SDKs and tools did they plan to incorporate into their product strategy?
  • Would they partner with a specialized company or would they prefer to build an in-house solution?

These were the questions I would seek to answer over the course of the weekend. With thousands of dollars in prizes and start-up perks up for grabs, this hackathon was a bit more serious. The result was a crop of ideas that incorporated a business strategy in addition to a novel technical approach. It was the kind of intellectually stimulating environment which categorizes a great hacking event.

After a short period of idea pitches, the hackers began to mingle and form teams. Several teams came to the event with well formed and, in some cases, patent-pending product designs. Discussions in the small teams focused around which features to include in the prototype and what technologies to use to build them. The idea of how to understand the ways in which the product will be used was not a topic of conversation. After personally speaking with nearly every team in attendance I can say that in general, the idea of tracking actions taken by a user was novel to most teams.

But, in a data-driven world, why was it a relatively novel idea? Continue Reading…

Casino Games are the New Battlefield. Choose Your Weapon

Author icon David Gutierrez|Comments icon 0

Ready the troops
Even though online casino games have been around for a while, the social and mobile versions of these games have just started gaining traction recently; now, these social and mobile developers are fighting even harder to dominate these spaces and to cash in on the high-value players in the casino gaming genre.

Why? Because to further complicate things, there’s also a new competitor on the battlefield: traditional, land-based casinos.

Guys like Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts International have years of experience on slot machines, poker, blackjack, bingo and other games. And, they’re forming alliances with or acquiring game studios to get into the social and mobile spaces.

There’s a lot at stake–from creating new acquisition channels (via social and mobile games) to monetizing players to extending the experience of real-life casinos to the online world. There are only so many whales, and it’s a fight to get their mind and wallet share. Continue Reading…

kSuite Just Got A Lot More Flexible

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 2

We’re always striving to give our customers better access to the data they need. So, today is a great day for serious number crunchers and data geeks.

We’re very proud to announce kSuite DataMineTM for Analysts, an industry-first, hosted, out-of-the-box data mining option equipping data analysts with unlimited query powers to help social gaming and mobile app developers better engage and monetize users.

It was built on our mantra that data should be accessible. To make the best decisions and move business forward, everyone—from analysts to developers to marketers to CEOs—needs access to the most actionable data.

Equipped with kSuite DataMine and basic knowledge of SQL, you now have free rein to ask questions, test hypotheses, and slice and dice data in any way you wish to uncover information that can be used to help prevent churn, drive in-app engagement, maximize virtual goods sales, analyze user cohorts over time, and more. kSuite DataMine makes it possible to answer questions such as:

  • What last three actions did users take before they uninstalled or failed to return?
  • What last five behaviors did users exhibit before purchasing virtual goods?
  • What are the purchase habits of my highest-value gamers or users?
  • Who are my most viral users, and how can I use that information to attract more of them?
  • What unusual spending patterns or other behaviors signal the presence of fraud or other anomalies?

Continue Reading…

The Colliding Worlds of Real and Virtual Casinos

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 1

Click here to view our popular webinar, A Look at Building Irresistible Casino Social Games.

by kScope guest contributor
Andrew Hughes, CEO of AbZorba Games

My father once said to me, “Son, everything in life is a gamble. Just know the odds.”

Now that I’m an adult and working in the online casino games business, his words of wisdom are helping guide me (and those like me) through a fast-changing industry.

Gamers’ growing appetite for social and mobile casino app games
Social and mobile casino games are trending, and will continue to do so. Games such as blackjack, poker and bingo, to name a few, have become outrageously popular.

The mobile format in particular offers the “perfect storm” of smartphone penetration, network reliability and app popularity. Throw in live multiplayers, like we did with AbZorba’s Live Blackjack21, and it’s seriously a compelling format.

Its proper, grown-up gaming with proper in-app spending power. Average revenue per user (ARPU) can get in the double digits, and the lifespans are incredibly long! We’ve seen players spend up to $3,000 for virtual chips—chips that they cannot cash out!

Online gambling is a multibillion-dollar market, but what are the risks?
So, why should a perfectly good social or mobile casino game that is generating good revenue from virtual goods take risks by venturing into “real” gambling, as in gambling with real payouts? Continue Reading…

Mobile App Marketer Wish-List: Full Transparency into Ads and User Behavior

Author icon Aaron Huang|Comments icon 1

So your hands are off the keyboard, your last piece of code is complete and you are ready to release your app to the hungry hordes of avid fans who are eagerly waiting in the wings… except you’re not Steve Jobs and this isn’t Apple.

You’re a mobile developer. Smart, sophisticated, but at the mercy of forces that lie outside of your control.

On one hand, everyone believes they hold a precious jewel, developed over months of hard sweat and elbow grease–the next big Angry Birds.

On the other hand, the keys to the kingdom (of users) lie in the hands of middlemen. Ad providers charge you good money to accomplish the two goals you need in order to succeed: scale and reach. But, it’s not that easy to do that, given today’s current mobile app marketing ecosystem.

The current state of things
Here’s the state of the mobile app marketing ecosystem today. Instead of transparency, you have opacity. Developers and marketers aren’t getting the right, timely information they need to effectively optimize their ad budgets and increase their ROI.

While there are many ad providers out there that provide reporting on user acquisition campaigns, there are also many that do not. Or, they provide manual data dumps on an irregular basis. Even when clean data is available, marketers and developers find it hard to efficiently process, match, store and analyze the information.

The point is that in the end, you still have to ingest a non-standardized set of data from all the various ad providers in the industry if/when you can get your hands on it. Because there are no clearly defined industry-wide standards for the measurement, collection and reporting of data from mobile advertising and cross-promotion networks, most mobile developers have trouble deducing meaningful marketing data from their user acquisition efforts. Ad providers, for their part, face the challenge of disparate, non-standardized data requests and protocols from many advertisers and publishers. Continue Reading…

Web Officially Dead: Sources

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

The page view is dying a slow, painful death.

That was the bold claim Dan made in November in his post, Page Views Don’t Pay Your Bills… Your Customers Do. (Or users. Or players. They’re good at paying, too.)

It seems we’re not the only ones who believe this.

Andrew Edwards from ClickZ wrote this interesting article, which not only supports Dan’s statement but also mentions Kontagent as one of the companies that’s pioneering the way we measure user engagement in this new world of social and mobile apps. We’re republishing the article with Andrew’s permission:

Web Officially Dead: Sources

San Francisco—In early March, 2012, the venerable Web Analytics Association changed its name to the Digital Analytics Association. Announced at the San Francisco eMetrics conference by none other than analytics ubermensch Jim Sterne, the name change confirmed rumors the Web is officially dead. After a period of lying in-state in Switzerland, services will take place at the old headquarters of Uunet, an ancient provider of bandwidth now remembered only by a weathered stelae in suburban northern Virginia.

If you detect liberal exaggeration above, as well as a bit of fabrication, you’re right. But the kernel of the story is true. The WAA is now the DAA, and for good reason. In fact, many would say it is late in renaming – though I would quibble with that given the lightning speed of change in the digital industries.

Some may say it’s not only overdue but also obvious. We’re hurtling down the information superhighway at speeds equivalent to that of a Bugatti Veyron now, with air dams deployed just to keep us from flying. And yet, as we speed into the “Big Data” mountains and deploy customer-location GPS systems unheard of in a simpler day, we may have failed to notice a few placards along the way: for while the Web may be “dead,” we are still relying on it as the bedrock delivery mechanism for content. Therefore, those placards must be saying something like “Long live the Web!”

So really, it isn’t that the Web is dead – it’s just that we are at last admitting to some of its underlying problems, and are, in fact, beginning to leverage ourselves beyond them. Continue Reading…

Up the Ante: Stay Ahead in Social and Mobile Casino Games

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

“More social and mobile game developers [will] try to cash in on the slots and bingo craze and more land-based casino brands [will] look at social and mobile acquisitions and licenses.”
-Inside Social Games, March 2012

A new breed of gambler is emerging
The 20- and 30-somethings who grew up with Facebook and Twitter are social. They shop online. They use their mobile phones to “check in.” They share their lives with their friends worldwide, in real time. And, now, they expect their gambling experience to follow suit.

For social casino game developers, this trend represents enormous opportunity. Some of these new gamblers are whales, but most are minnows. Who’s going to catch the whales? The hunt is on. Continue Reading…