Leo Perri, CEO of Delta Bingo and Gaming, admits bingo is traditionally a social game that people play with friends. During the session “Designing the Future of Play: Creativity Meets Casino” at SBC Americas in Fort Lauderdale, Perri said there are ways to recreate bingo’s social aspect.
“We have an online chat where players interact with each other,” said Perri during the session. “It’s obviously different from your land-based center, but we also look to mimic a lot of the games we do in the center.”
Panel moderator Andres Blanco, Gamanza Engage Managing Director and Chief Product Officer, said when the future of gaming is mentioned, “We’re not just talking about better graphics and faster loading times. We’re actually trying to shape the player experience. We’ve seen how gamification has not just been a trend, it’s actually becoming a necessity in most brands, and historically, casinos and igaming have depended on extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is, for example, the bonus strategy, giving something for someone to make an action.”
The problem with extrinsic motivation, Blanco said, is, “When you remove that motivation from the experience, people are not going to do the action you’re expecting. So brands are now building more interactive features, intrinsic motivation mechanics.”
Erica Goldstein, Galaxy Gaming’s Director of North America Igaming, noted she has learned that what works in land-based casinos usually translates to online. “Our strategy in the beginning was build a game that’s not so different from, say, blackjack. Don’t make it too complicated, make it easy for a dealer to deal and easy for a player to understand.”
Goldstein added that Galaxy has two games coming out that follow this model.
“We took our land-based progressive, which has all these bonus mechanics and multipliers, and kind of migrated from just basic to more interesting and eye-catching. We can also link all the games now. Most recently, we’ve been focusing on adding multipliers, especially online. What you can’t do in land-based, you can actually do online.”
Swiss Casinos Group CEO Marcel Tabler said that they encourage players to play online and in brick-and-mortar casinos, because that increases player engagement.
“We brought a lot of our best online players to our land-based properties and we see that the lifetime more than doubles if we manage to bring the player to the property, which makes sense, right?” Tabler said. “You don’t build up a relationship with a website, but if you have been in a place, had a drink, talked to the people, that’s great loyalty, and then we try to figure out what is that that online player missing in the land-based casinos.
“It’s quite obvious. I mean, if you’re used to playing online, land-based casinos are quite boring, to be honest, which is sad, because I really enjoy operating land-based casinos. That’s where we now try to put in a lot of work. How can we make land-based casinos as exciting as online casinos?”
