A medium-sized gaming company, Entertainment Gaming Asia (EGA), has just released its plans to develop and run an online social casino in order to help boost its receding revenue. The company focuses its efforts primarily on the Pan-Asia gaming market, which has seen a few months of revenue losses. These losses have taken them and their board of directors to seek out alternate ways to increase revenue within their casinos, as well as bring new players in.
Online Social Casinos Perfect Marketing Tool
Social casinos can operate in many different ways, with the exception of allowing any players to actually spend or gain any money through the different games being offered. This is why most of them advertise themselves as Free-to-Play, powerful words for those that don’t want to spend money while playing on their preferred social media site. However, many of these social gaming sites and apps allow players to purchase different items using real currency, like a fictitious drink, or additional “chips” to play with; the chips being lives or additional turns to play.
The one thing that social casinos have proven to be quite effective at is marketing the brick-and-mortar casino that they represent. Just like in New Jersey, social gaming sites have actually increased foot traffic into casinos, allowing players to test the available games for free before moving on to real money games. A very powerful and relatively cheap marketing tool that can be used to reach thousands of people every day and this is exactly what EGA wants to take advantage of.
Help Boost Their Revenue
The gaming company currently leases their electronic gaming machines in several Asian countries like the Philippines and Cambodia, but the revenue generated from those areas have been declining. During their second quarter, 2016 financial statement they only earned $2.3 million, a huge decrease of 53.7 percent year-over-year, as they earned $4.9 million in 2015. Their hope is to develop online social casinos as a means to help increase these declining revenues.
According to Clarence Chung, CEO of EGA, they will create the application for mobile device use in the Pan-Asian market, where they will use the Free-to-Play strategy, allowing players to purchase in-game coins that will extend their playing time or accelerate progress; pay-to-win style. This has worked in many different countries and could turn out to be a good strategy for EGA.