In the past couple of years social slots have been growing quickly, getting closer to video slots. They’ve become a constantly growing business, getting bigger every year. The revenue of Playtika for the second quarter of 2015 was around $240 million and a Chinese consortium bought it for $4.4 billion.
This might look absurd, as videos slots need to be played with real money and social slots are always free. Still, these are the facts and they are backed by strong reasons. The difference is that companies that focus on social slots have implemented things that video slot providers aren’t even considering.
Today we will discuss the reasons behind this huge growth and how social slots are able to come closer to video slots each year.
The Gaming Experience of Social Internet Games Is Much Better
From the player’s perspective, video slots are fun, but there is real money involved and they take it as a very serious thing. On the other hand, social internet games like slots are considered to be all about the fun they provide when played. There are many questionnaires that support these claims, as well as player behavior.
You will never see a player getting mad about free slot machine games as they would about a video slots. People like playing fun social games online because they have fun and innovative graphics, animation, gamification elements, music, and sounds, all of which improve the overall gaming experience.
The RTP in Social Slots Can be Chosen by Players
Just to be clear, the most popular social slots have very difficult RTP on all of their slots. The RTP on them is never over 100% and, in most cases, it hardly reaches 97%. Still, social slots are games that aren’t designed to have a single shot. When looking at them as a whole, these games give their players free gambling money through daily bonuses, perks, gifts and even hourly bonuses.
Additionally, a lot of social slots have mechanics where players can change their bets and with them, change the RTP to their liking. This gives them more control and engages them to play for a longer time with smaller bets, or try to advance quickly with a lowered RTP.
More Research is Done with Social Slots
All companies that have social slots invest in research that gives them insights about player behavior. They collect valuable data from all of their many active players on an everyday basis. Additionally, they do A/B split testing for various factors including, graphics, game mathematics, marketing and pop-ups.
Some of the best social slot games rely on math models that were established with A/B tests, as they’ve been proven to improve income and player retention. They’ve also used similar tests to create economies that were able to improve monetization by over 50%.
On the other hand, video slot companies invest very little in research and most of them still make decisions based on their gut and feelings instead of using well-researched facts.
Free Online Social Games For Adults Adopt Gamification
Gamification has brought many things into online social games for adults. The worldwide popularity of slot machines is thanks to its inclusion of experience advancement, the ability to unlock new games, bonuses, gifting people, inviting people to play for rewards and so on. All of these gamification elements have greatly improved player retention and the number of new players.
On the other hand, video slots have remained closed and they didn’t utilize any gaming knowledge that was discovered and explored through gamification. They remained the same for a long period of time and no dramatic changes have been introduced. This is why their profits are dwindling and why most young players don’t find them appealing.
Social Slot Games Evolve Quickly
Companies that offer social slot games release a new social games almost every month. This is because they understand that new games will possibly attract new players and retain those that are starting to get bored with old online social media games. This flexibility and speed is owed to the fact that CEOs of such companies usually have one or two people working on new games, and they have the freedom to do as they wish.
With video slot companies, on the other hand, there is a whole bureaucratic process with many people involved and a lot of meetings and discussions, so a single new game could take months to get released. Additionally, it might be incoherent and offer a bad experience, as there are people involved in making it that shouldn’t have had a say in the first place.
Final Thoughts
Social slots are growing in every possible way and their methods for improvement and research have brought them where they are today. The fact that the video slot companies are lazy and don’t care about improving their user experience has put them in a difficult position. However, they can change and adopt many things that social slots have, but the question is: “Will they?”
