A panel of casino operators and developers has suggested that a convergence between the igaming and video gaming industries will influence the future of slot machine design.
Speaking on Wednesday afternoon as part of SBC Summit Barcelona Digital, Evoplay Entertainment Chief Business Development officer Vladimir Malakchi said COVID-19 had highlighted a preference among younger players for skill-based games.
Launched earlier this year, Evoplay’s Dungeon: Immortal Evil slot was lauded as the industry’s first RPG slot game. Malakchi said, “We see from the younger audience, 21- to 35-years-old, it is a very popular product. The older audience prefer a more old-school product, which is not skill-based.”
Evoplay also launched skill-based games with a sports theme during the pandemic to fill the gap in sports betting. He said these games increased engagement from 50% to 55%, suggesting that more interactive elements are important to some, but not all, players.
“I think it will become more popular, because the audience is growing up and it is about another generation of audience, another generation of players. They are more demanding about this and as operators, you should have some skill-based games and you should work with this audience, and also from software providers – you should diversify your products,” Malakchi said.
Panel chair and co-founder of Alea, Alexandre Tomic, alluded to an archaic consensus among igaming professionals that slot players are solitary, but said that the emergence and popularity of slot streaming has proved this may not be entirely true.
“When you guys – streamers – came, I was one of the first to say it will never work. How would it work to see a guy playing a slot machine? And it worked,” he said.
“It’s a silently social game. It’s very funny how slot players [in casinos] monitor each other. They may not talk, but they do look at wins,” Tomic added. “Slots are finally going to become social.”
However, Lindar Media Managing Director Savvas Fellas and CasinoGrounds CEO Tobias Svensen raised concerns that the industry is not ambitious enough in its attempts to innovate.
“I think we’re a bit too stuck in “‘this is what we’re used to'”, Svenson said, adding that he believed true innovation was more likely to come from outside of the industry than within it.
Pointing to Big Time Gaming’s Megaways mechanic, he added: “The second somebody innovates something fairly simple and succeeds, everyone jumps on it.”
Big Time Gaming has licensed the mechanic enabling a range of operators and developers to integrate it into their games.
Returning to the likely move of igaming toward traditional video gaming concepts, Napoleon Sports & Casino Head of Casino Nicholas Van Malderghem said, “I have the feeling that the igaming industry now is where the gaming industry was ten years ago. And where we are now, opening up with skill games and social, is going to help the industry open up to a broader audience – of course, while taking responsible gambling into account.”
Svensen said the fact that COVID-19 has altered the way friends socialize, moving gatherings online rather than in-person, may lend itself to a shift in player preferences too. “I would really like to see innovation in the same sort of area in game play. Social, community, playing with a purpose, following a narrative,” he said.
Fellas agreed that the industry was lagging behind on innovation. “When we say ‘innovation,’ our bar is too low. I like Megaways, I get it, I understand it, but is it really innovation?” He suggested that part of the reason for this may be that, unlike the video gaming industry, igaming has been hamstrung by the burden of regulation.
“It’s so intense that we’ve basically become something that we never set out to be,” he said. “We’re now looking for problem gamblers, affordability checks, and they take precedent over all these things and we can only do so much. If we’re ten years behind, then it will take longer than ten years to catch up. They don’t have the regulation we have.”
