SciPlay's Joe Byrne on Social Casino

the following is a conversation with joe byrne director of business development and strategy at sciplay one of the world's biggest and most successful social casino game companies the conversation was facilitated in partnership with appianie who is currently rolling out an update to their gaming taxonomy but i wanted to find out how the most sophisticated game companies use market intelligence data to inform their product strategy how given new changes because of things like idfa deprecation for example would create new requirements for the kinds of insights from the data that we look for and ending the conversation with strategic insights on how the social casino genre is evolving and new trends for that genre just to be clear this is not a paid content sponsorship but i would like to express much appreciation to appiany for introducing and facilitating this conversation this is the game makers podcast and here

is my conversation with joe byrne from sciplay hello everyone we're here today with joe byrne director of business development and strategy at sciplay very excited to be talking with you joe and we are here today to talk about the social casino genre how it's evolving and how app annie data can be used to inform strategy and decision making but before we jump into some additional questions joe i thought we could start by having you talk a little bit about yourself your role at sciplay yeah absolutely thanks for having me i'm really excited to be here um as you mentioned i'm the director of business development and strategy here at sciplay uh that takes a number of different um initiatives but um generally speaking kind of any corporate strategy um uh projects that we might uh

undertake um comes through me in in some form i also um handle all of our partner relations so um with folks uh like kapani but also like our platform um like google and apple and a lot of my role um hinges on m a evaluation and leading that process as well right and so i thought as a first question we could talk about maybe your use of app annie data in social casino could you talk about maybe some of the key applications or how you're using the data today yeah for sure um from from my perspective personally as i said you know a lot of my role is um is in the m a um space and and evaluating different opportunities and so um the the kind of taxonomy and game iq that app annie provides has made it super simple for uh for me and some of my colleagues to go in quickly and say okay um what is um the size of let's say the the card genre for example or the board

genre or solitaire things like that um and what are the top players in that market and you know how concentrated um the the revenues are and the downloads are is it dominated by a few uh top players is it very fragmented all those sort of things um you know we can kind of get a a very quick uh view of through the game iq and taxonomy reports um our teams use it um looking more internally so our game teams and our product teams in particular are looking more at um you know how their uh title is performing against um some other competitors looking at the annotations on the graph and saying okay this competitor did a release on on this date look what happened to their revenue or their downloads you know what are they doing kind of that competitive intelligence uh type aspect and then of course um you know we have a lot of our ua folks that are looking more in um in aso and keywords and creatives and things like that so um you know we have a number of different use cases

um throughout our organization kind of depending on what discipline you sit in right i kind of agree with you in terms of like when we look at some of the changes that app annie has been making at the genre and sub-genre level like that additional layer of granularity for me makes a lot more useful because you're getting much more specific competitive sets yeah no question yeah and i thought the other thing we could talk about was one of the things that app danny has been trying to do and one of the reasons why they talked to me was to try and determine how to make the app annie data more actionable and so just kind of as a hypothesis that i have when when i think about the social casino genre is like one one thing i thought would be interesting would be to look at for example how with idfa deprecation how pre and post idf idfa deprecation whether payment behavior and the payment profile whether it's payment buck payer buckets or things of that nature changes because

you're no longer potentially able to target super high value whales in a post idfa deprecation world and so wondering if that's actually an application that you guys are thinking about or how useful that would be in social casino yeah no question i mean you know you you bring up a great point with with idfa and ios 14.5 i mean it's it's a huge shift in in the industry um to be honest you know we're we're still figuring out the long-term effects of it you know we we've done some testing and of course have a little bit of idea but um it's still pretty early um in the stages and so um we would take a lot of that data um to make kind of informed decisions on you know you you referenced it a little bit joe on on pre and post and how potential player and payer behaviors uh have have changed and so for example you know we might see post idfa deprecation uh you know there was a lot um more spenders but at a lower level

for example so our our transaction size has decreased and um and then we can take that that data to our product teams and say okay um you know what are some features that we can develop that we can spec out to to target that area to improve our average transaction size for example or improve our sessions per day or or number of transactions per user things like that and so i think that data you know could be super actionable um particularly for our product teams as they think about their road map going forward in this post idfa world right okay great and besides like whether it's idfa deprecation related or not are there other things that you guys are thinking about and with respect to the usage of the data in terms of making it more actionable yeah absolutely you know i mentioned kind of a little bit about our product teams and looking at that kind of competitive

analysis you know what are some of the top players doing and how does that differ from from what we have in in the game um and you know um we we take that um and and you know we can set up you know dashboards and alerts and things like that which is which is a great way to um to kind of keep your finger on the pulse of what's happening uh competitively but um you know that data um generally um outward looking is is something that our our product teams um take and review where um where these new changes in our competitors took hold is it a geographic um uh boost is it a download boost is it a revenue boost um is it a platform boost in terms of google vs ios so all those things uh you know are really important and uh and allow us to take that data and literally put it actionable put it in our roadmap um our product roadmap whether that's next quarter or two quarters down the road to attack some of those um those spots

in our games that that could uh could use improvement okay great so i thought we could now talk a little bit more about like the evolution of social casino i think one thing that we saw especially during covid and over 2020 was the kind of explosion in people wanting to have social experiences in gaming and so wondering if you could talk about within social casino where do you see social experiences within this genre going in the future yeah for sure um you know it's it's pretty early i think in a lot of these social experiences for the social casino genre uh in particular you know you see it a little bit more in um in some mid core and and some rpg type games but um you know i think there's tons of potential you know particularly when you think about like multiplayer you know a lot of people um go into their favorite brick and mortar casino with a friend or a group of friends and they sit around at you know at a bank of slot machines and and um you know play next to their friends and say hey how are you doing on this machine how's that machine going

um and i think that would be a really cool creative way that that social casino companies slots in particular um could could use those kind of multiplayer um uh aspects and social experiences and then you know that evolves even more you know when when you think about like teams or clubs guilds those sort of things again something that you see a lot more in kind of the the mid core um type games um you know you saw like clash of clans really make this popular and and joining you know a particular clan um you know you can you can form these in in social casino as well and and have some competition uh there and we found you know the competitive nature of uh of really any genre is a very powerful thing for our players so um i think there's a ton of room to grow um you know in that implementation of social experiences within the social casino category got it and maybe just as a last question like we're starting to see the integration of meta

features in social casino and wondering if you could speak to this trend in particular whether you think it continues and grows or what do you generally expect to see along those lines yeah another good question i mean similar to what i was just mentioning i think you know the social casino genre has lagged behind a little bit in some of our other um adjacent genres of promoting kind of these meta features and you know one you think about is is like a progression system a lot of games you're seeing now like a map or um or a way for the for the player to earn kind of a status as as they go and i think you're gonna see a lot more of that um going forward you know just if you think about um you know in the in the casino space um in particular you know maybe you go into a casino and and you win at a slot machine and um and you get to build a casino and then um you you know you you get to own another casino and you kind of think

about this almost builder mechanic that's super popular um in other games like garden scapes and homescapes kind of in the more casual space so i think there's a lot of way uh a lot of ways that um you know you really can create those uh meta features um within casino that we haven't seen yet um i know even thinking about uh live ops live operations that was something that uh you know the social casino industry was pretty new to just three four maybe five years ago but had really taken hold in some other genres i think that's kind of the precursor to more of these meta progression and storyline type implementations that i think will be really successful in the social casino genre all right joe byrne thank you very much for your time there we have it joe byrne from sciplay thank you very much for your time and insights thanks for having me [Music]

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