Meta-feature trends in social casino games

[Music] and so I'd like to hand the floor to Brett's Nowak who is the CEO of liquid and gripped which is a fascinating title of a company's arm I'm just going to sit and listen to what you have to talk about all right he actually the title comes from a Steve Jobs quote that he said product development was like putting liquid and grid into rocks he tells a story about me as a kid basically this old man a street showed them how to put make rough stones into polished polished rocks and did he pour a little liquid and grit in it and they come back two days later and you get polished stones and and so our companies always tried to be the liquid and grit to product development so that's how we got our name like vinegar it going off topic already it's bad time okay 20 minutes I want to make this quicker

than 20 minutes this is all right all right quick overview just I'll do a quick intro then we'll get into the featured trends which is vocal to talk and then probably won't have any time for Q&A so I'll just skip that obviously so a quick introduction as I said I was a CEO and Founder I am co-founder of liquid and grit I'll talk a second about what we do was path the director of product at blue shell games and then lead product manager zynga poker and a random fact I was professional hockey player before this but when I was at Zynga and blue shell games as product manager do we have any product managers here no okay well when I was when I was busy product manager I always wanted to have more information and we always pass around future ideas and checking out different games and we're obviously very busy and a lot of the information I was getting was very high level so sort of like the tides changing or the markets growing 3%

you know tight being the market quarter-over-quarter that was really doing any good for me and on the ground floor sort of being a soldier and so I wanted information for me to make more better product decisions so that's why I started looking to grit we basically equipped product managers with a product information all the slides that's Dec are basically taken from the ports that we present to clients on a monthly basis so you'll get an idea of what type of information we provide I include one quote that we have at the back of all of our most of our reports from TS Eliot which is about basically how wise oh it's you know do a good job of taking in information and making it better this is a actually this is the older deck but it'll be fine it was one of those sliders wanted to mention that had a trend line for Vegas and what it showed was that the percentage of revenue from gaming in Vegas over the

last 25 years has actually declined revenue overall has increased but gaming revenue has declined dramatically and what we've seen is an increase in non-gaming like nightlife and hotels and eating out and I think social casino is seeing the beginning of that trend and that's going to place more pressure on meta features being better for for players as games become more shared and if you're obviously familiar the space double down with acquired by W so you're going to see more of the content in each of the apps being shared which is very similar to the casino where the content is being shared so meta features is going to be even more important in the next coming years so I'm going to go through actually before I go into it what are you guys looking for me to talk about here if I can go through different things you're not PMS any like I don't want to say what you do what what you do or no publishing all right well I'll

just I'll just go okay cool all right I'll talk to you - all right great so you know one of the biggest trends we've seen in the spaces is clubs and leagues a huge casino obviously being the best example of that the one of the big things that we're going to see in social casino as as this has been obviously very successful is more social casino games looking to midcourt features we're actually going to expand into different genres and mid core being one of them because I think our social casino subscribers are going to want to have this information the W is actually the first to do clubs they did a daily clubs which was a very simple huge concei no jumped in with their version of leagues leagues and clubs I'm kind of pairing together they have obviously Billie's with more of the community very very similar to the mid core version of it this is a double up again this sorry this is a this is a

older version of the report but are the slides but you can see double up with um was sort of the first enter with with clubs and then we're seizing a poker entering with leagues which I will talk about a second but this was very revenue impactful for them in the last couple quarters they actually just doubled down investments in leagues with a sort of a IP level tournament league that they just released last month so they're actually doubling down on this feature and then big fish casino jumped on board and then even W casino jumped on board so you kind of see a classic evolution of socials casino where one person comes out it successful and we present this information to our subscribers and then you see the adoption across the platform one thing obviously in a one major trend in social casino is kind of the somewhat to move away from the idea that everybody we should think about every every player and we should be really pushing for da you what what we're

seeing with you know you and obviously in casino is that games are very very focused on the VIP so double uses casinos example of clubs is just focusing on there very much so on their VIP players and allowing them to have multiple clubs and and the ability to basically influence larger groups so this is not really a meta feature but this is going to be a trend that you know what are you seeing and then that we're going to see get more competitive in social so you know is poker again if you're familiar with the spacing of poker released their recorded report there's second last quarterly report and talked about poker being their shining star this is actually the quote from from their public earnings call how they had a year of your bookings and 32 almost 30 percent quarter-over-quarter the graph goes down but that's actually ranking they called out specifically leaves and challenges we just talked about leagues so it I'm talking about

poker key but I think poker in general is going to be a big a big growth area in social casino and not exactly a met a feature but other so slots games are going to add poker to their apps and more vulgar apps are going to come out and you're going to see people there's a bunch actually poker apps in the space that people have had for a long time TinyCo for instances how to poker up in space for a long time and I just saw an update in their app so you're going to kind of see people investing more in poker within poker I think sort of this category is just competition in general so challenges being one thing that was successful for zynga poker and again I mentioned this before weekly playoffs is something they just invested in so they're they're actually getting more like a real money space and something that supports that poker he played teeka just released poker heat which is a picture which is a very we have the

features here I'm going through these pretty fast but these are actually slides from our our reports and we kind of we kind of structure it that you can read the top line for the exact so you just want to get an idea and then we include all the the detailed information for the PM's like I said for people like me who are trying to keep their day job and then also build features but one things about poker sheet is that it's it's very simple it's basically taken the the one thing out of the thing of poker and made it of the core focus which is like this leaderboard league system and then later on top of a pretty simple app um it's a great app I spend a hundred dollars in it last couple weeks so losing chips and the poker is actually really good quality they control the economy really tightly so one thing that we do in our reports is go deep into the economy we tear down an app a months and then we compare in economies and they've tuned their economy really tightly so that players

players can't get a lot of free coins which makes the poker quality higher so again this is uh so this is the progression isn't it something exactly new this is actually supposed to be non level progression so one of the things that platica has sort of done extremely well is put a put a progression bar on it stipulated so they put it on their machines they put on everything and they've actually created a lot of secondary and tertiary progression systems snakes and ladders is their recent release which adds a little volatility to player's progression with the snake and ladder system which is relatively interesting Zynga and other companies in the space have kind of jumped on board in terms of adding more progression to their social casino apps there's kind of four player types that we talk about at our business and one of them being plain-jane which is just a

slots player and then the two sort of in the middle being entertained dinner Tammy Eddie's and night out Nancy's and and this is the group that that these progression progression apps are really competing for and play chica is kind of old nets based PC Zynga and you're I think you're going to see a part of Vegas jump in that and at that area and try to take that and compete in that space as these guys actually compete for the other two that the fourth being the social group something that's a lot of mania did really inch while was actually customize the progression system for different levels of difficulty there's a lot of edge cases around building this type of feature because so they simplified it and did a great job with making it so that you you pick the level set and you keep it and I love this I love this feature for how they set it up because because when you're developing the features for difficulty per players obviously it's very it's very hard to like tune it correctly because we have

so many obviously such a wide range and they actually did a nice job of customizing it which we'll talk about which I'll talk about a second and then you're seeing it again in other this is Play Studios pop slots which has been successful and they're seeing them incorporate boosts and purchases into the quest system so you're seeing for the evolution social you know of again sort of this secondary secondary progression system and if you go deeper into play chica zaps you'll see progression bars on there they're even developing their progression bars and their progression systems on their slot machines as well which has been pretty and pretty innovative so another thing that we're seeing is like a resurrection of social you know - two big wins - the bigger wins obviously in the last year for social casino have been pops lots and huge huge casino and obviously those two really focus on the social aspect of the of the game particularly also in the machine itself

so it's not just about playing the machine we also are seeing some more trends and I'll talk about in a second in the social centers so there are people are reinvesting in their viral flows which is pretty interesting so this is a see this is a okay well this is it all right well so I did have two slides on huge casino and pop slots I apologize but I'm sure you're familiar with those apps and and they do and they're primarily focused on social so again they are really focused they're really buying into the trend that Vegas has bought into about ten years ago realizing that the games the the slot machines and the baccarat and everything else is really secondary to the experience and it jumped in to just focusing on social as being at the core experience and so what you're which has

been great and you're I think you're going to see even more of that in for casino I think the one thing that hasn't been really tackled with casino and you know it's here for last talk is like what I kind of consider is real social so it's been social from one person to many and this is a good example of it this this is a person who has you know a hundred two hundred friends and that sort of one-to-many and that's been the classic you know gaming Zynga model if you have had people be social with as many people as I can so that you get da you what I think is probably the next evolution is someone coming around actually creating like closer niche socials or hope which hasn't been hasn't been solved in social casino the other thing that's the other interesting thing that we've seen that's kind of like budding and innovation in social casino is referral programs viral flows are kind of making resurgence I think there was a dip where people didn't believe there was any value in getting people to send virals on mobile is all you a we're actually seeing on

PM's kind of invest in this idea in in ways to get more installs and referral program it's been one of them this is Inga's Wizard of Oz app where they did a referral program players got $1 worth of coins when they basically had other people join they did something interesting here too where they had it be also returners so if you sent a viral to somebody or some referral code to somebody who was actually already in a game they leveled up but or you had installed you would get rewarded as well we're seeing a bunch of different virals the experiments basically going out in the last quarter so I expect to see some more interesting things there sort of the one of the one of the classic social casino trends that I've seen lately is the capitalization of sort of composition the capitalizing on the up the ability to when players

unlocked and buy something in the window for them to make another purchase this is probably one of the best examples of it with a great flow in the bottom right hand corner but what this is a hot Vegas slot that what they're doing is they're they're converting people so on top left-hand corner image they're trying to convert people on a $2.00 package in the free spin mode so they're very low price point and then within the 15-minute window one players you know click out or if they don't they'll pop up the bottom right-hand corner if the players have lost amount of coins they'll try to do a recoup the losses pop up with showing how much they've lost how much they can recoup it they made purchase and then again capitalizing on just this window where they haven't don't have to put in the password any longer you're seeing several different sort of implementations of it this is actually a slaughter mania where they right after you make a purchase it kind of makes it seem like you get a free spin of this

machine and they'll pop left-hand corner although and once you make the purchase you're actually notified that you need to make another purchase to unlock this this cool slot machine to make enough to get another win so there again capitalizing on this window you get a second purchase and they're obvious obviously up sewing one thing that's a lot of money does extremely well is showcase like all the things that you're getting when you make a purchase in the bottom right hand corner where you're having you know all the different the gift cards that collect all options the two-hour boost and the loyalty point and DoubleDown did like a pretty awesome one and I'm a revenue revenue PM so awesome in my world but is you actually bought when you buy the hundred dollar package you actually unlock a much better package right after all so so Wales open you'll spend two hundred dollars right away which is first week and then the last trend some of running short on time is the personalization

customization I really love this new trend one is I thought this was Caesar slots released actual video those personalized to players so this is one of our are sort of like market researchers that played 13 games their favorite machine was the this Greece machine their biggest win and this was actually a YouTube video that they could post online it's pretty great to see like this personalization and then they can post it to Facebook so you're seeing this this is kind of like an exploratory trend for for some of the apps to be able to like UGC wasn't you know last talk so we're kind of seeing that social because you know the other is is so the middle column so this is a one section or report just talks about like a little small retention polish pete pieces and i love this feature and health of fun players can actually turn on a system that i will actually download i mean download you'll actually remove machines they're already downloaded so it will

make the app in their device to be smaller this is extremely valuable for android players them because you know android players are more concerned with the load on their phones and on the top is another personalization where you're seeing them actually pull the the images from other players who have been lapsed and so they're saying and so that the player like me is getting an image of some friend of mine that has been lapsed and that it's asking if i want to like take them bring them back into the game and then lastly you know we're seeing an increase and I think this is actually a huge growth opportunity and social casino still is and lagging far far behind land bases is sort of customer service this you know this was an lucky okis you know where you could actually message customer service directly and the message in their message center one of the games just released 24/7 support for their whales for the top three tiers on in the VIP so

I think that this is going to be sort of next development one of the next developments or social casino is the investment in customer service Wow thank you very much [Applause] [Music]