In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Stephanie Raquel, Shaun McCamley of Global Market Advisors explains how gambling operators could capitalize on the popularity of social games.
No one can deny the popularity of mobile phones worldwide. In fact, analysts are predicting that the number of mobile phone users in the world is expected to hit the 5 billion mark by 2019.
Fueling the growth of mobile phones in the world is the increasing popularity of smartphones, which Statista predict to grow by one billion in five years. To give a clearer picture, the research firm projects the number of smartphone users in the world to reach 2.6 billion by 2019.
With this number, Shaun McCamley of Global Market Advisors believes that gaming operators should quickly pounce on the opportunity to make incremental revenues from social games.
The good thing about social games, according to McCamley, is the fact that social game players don’t care if they are going to win prizes.
“Some of the big guys really missed out on online poker in the early days and I’m sure they regretted that decision. My advice, don’t hang around. Take a second look on social game,” McCamley told CalvinAyre.com. “People didn’t realize how much money can be made from social games. I guess, since poker was obviously something you could see in front of you, because people gamble and you know, you could see the table and you can play against one another, social games now are not free because people actually pay good money to buy more credits while they are playing.”
McCamley said there are people who spend thousands of dollars a month on social games even if they know they will not gain anything from playing it. Most social game players, according to McCamley, only want to be entertained.
“If gaming operators or if property owners are looking for something they can use as a good incremental revenue, they may not want to miss the boat on that,” he pointed out. “The games are very addictive, and some people just don’t want to wait for the time to come around to get their free credits. So some people are spending thousands of dollars a month, [when] there is no win, there is no prize, there’s nothing for them to cash out. They don’t win a teddy bear. It is just for entertainment, by the way.”
Aside from revenues, McCamley do believe that social games are easy to brand and to promote, and also it is easy for them to encourage, and for new markets, developing new players, social games I think is quite a good way to go forward.
He, however, cautioned operators from building a platform since first, they couldn’t do it by themselves and lastly, it will take a long time to learn the right processes to build a platform.
“They cannot do it by themselves. It takes a long time to learn the right processes, to build a platform. They can’t build around platform, so they’ve really got to look around, find a platform provider that provides the games that they like, work without provider, and get the game branded and get it out there using other platform but don’t take time to learn this things,” McCamley said.
