February 2019 – The Business of Social Games and Casino

Think of Non-Customers First If You Want to Grow

I have been a consistent advocate of Blue Ocean strategy for years and a blog post by the Blue Ocean Team shows how you can grow your business by focusing on non-customers. Rather than fighting with your competitors to split up the existing pie, by thinking about non-customers you have greater growth potential. The blog post shows three types of non-customers and by understanding them you can tailor your product, new products or marketing to meet their needs. Below are the three groups of non-customers and my thoughts on their relevance to the social casino industry.

Non-customers who occasionally purchase or play

The first group of non-customers who represent a potential market are those who sit on the edge of the market, they purchase minimally your industry’s offerings but are always looking and quick to move to an alternative. The Blue Ocean Team uses the Pret A Manger chainas an example, as they appealed to people who reluctantly bought fast food but were looking for an alternative.

The social casino ecosystem includes many of these non-customers. These include gamers who are ready to skip to another genre (hypercasual, match-3, etc) if they see an appealing ad or the 90 plus percent of players who will play but not monetize. There are first-tier noncustomers waiting to be swayed in every industry.

Non-customers who refuse to become customers

The second group of non-customers is people who know an industry exists but have rejected it. As the Blue Ocean Team writes, “they have consciously thought about and considered your offering and then rejected it. It might be because another offering meets their needs better, or it could be that they simply can’t afford your offering. A second-tier noncustomer will compare your offering with another offering, weighing the pros and cons of each….The fact that second-tier noncustomers considered your industry means that you are far closer to possibly capturing them than you realize. So you need to find out why second-tier noncustomers refuse to use the products or services of your industry.”

In the social casino space, there are three types of these non-customers. The first is real money casino players (either land based or online) who have decided to not to play a free to play offering. They could have passed because they are only playing for economic reasons or the games offered are not what they prefer. The second is male casino players who may have rejected social casino because they consider them too “pink.” The third group is people who have tried social slot games but did not like the slot mechanic.

Non-customers who have not considered your industry

This category of non-customers has never considered your industry as an option. These non-customers have not been targeted ever by any company in your industry. This group is important to consider as it represents the largest potential market to penetrate (by definition it is everyone else). Existing companies in your industry assume these peoples needs are satisfied better by other industries.

In the social casino space, these are people who do not know or care that social slots games exist. It can be gamblers, gamers (other genres) or even people who have not played a mobile game.

What non-customers mean for social casino

Non-customers are particularly important to social casino as the ecosystem has been growing consistently but through better monetization rather than an increase in customers. If the industry is going to continue growing or if you want to gain market share, appealing to non-customers is the best option. First, you can tailor a product appeal to people who play but do not monetize or play rarely. Second, you can build a product for people who have churned, tried social casino games but left. Finally, you can build a social casino product for people who the industry has never targeted.

While the successful companies will come up with concepts internally and not rely on this blog to provide the answers, the key will be creating social casino products that do not simply replicate the existing games. That means looking at mechanics other than slots. Is also means creating an environment that is not targeting 40+ women. To successfully turn non-customers into customers, the parameters of the products also must shift.

Key takeaways

While many companies look at their competitors and try to grow by building a better product for existing customers, the biggest opportunity exists in appealing to non-customers.
There are three types of non-customers: those who occasionally purchase or play, those who have rejected the current offerings and those who have not considered your industry.
If social casino is going to continue growing or if you want to gain market share, appealing to non-customers is the best option. First, you can tailor a product appeal to people who play but do not monetize or play rarely. Second, you can build a product for people who have churned, tried social casino games but left. Finally, you can build a social casino product for people who the industry has never targeted.

Creating growth loops to scale your game

While apps and games have traditionally grown by having the acquisition team focus on the funnel, a recent blog post, Growth Loops are the New Funnels by growth guru Brian Balfour, shows a better strategy is to build growth loops. Rather than asking your marketing or user acquisition team to optimize user acquisition channels, growth loops has product and acquisition working holistically to build a product that will scale.

The traditional thinking

The strategy most game and app developers is create a great product, then optimize the acquisition funnel. After creating the product, they focus on optimizing the funnel below (testing different channels and strategies) to scale. This is a very KPI driven exercise, with each level of the funnel optimized through experiments and testing. The funnel consists of five categories, in this order:

Acquisition. Helping as many users as possible discover the game. This can be discovered by visitors in the app store, downloads, app install, etc.
Activation. Once acquiring a user, how many start playing the game (or using the app). This category can be measured by first spin (in a casino game), players who Facebook Connect, new accounts, completed tutorial, etc.
Retention. Retention is the next, and arguably most important, category in the funnel. In games, this is often measured by how many players come by the next day (D1), return in a week (D7) or are active a month after installing (D30). Other good retention metrics are CURR (current rate of returning users) or engagement metrics (how much time spent in app).
Referral. How many of your active players are helping bring new players. This category can be measured by actual referrals or K-score (number between 0-100 that indicates the strength of engagement between your product and your contacts, accounts, opportunities and leads).
Revenue. The final layer of the funnel is revenue, how well you monetize the players. This metric is measured by ARPDAU (average revenue per daily active user), conversion rate (how many players spend), frequency of purchases, total lifetime spend, etc.

Successful companies would optimize the above funnel, testing different channels, creative, etc., at each step of the funnel, then optimizing spend to improve these KPIs.

The new approach

Rather than focusing on the five categories in the growth funnel, Balfour suggests a holistic approach to growth. As Balfour points out, while the growth funnel has helped many companies scale, it is over eleven years old and the industry has since evolved. Funnels lead to silos, where the product team has its own domain, growth has its empire while monetization owns its business. This strategy can lead to failure as the product is not built to optimize the channels where it will be distributed (e.g. the AppStores).

The key is building a product or game where growth is part of the core product loop, not a separate task done by a growth or acquisition or marketing team. As Balfour writes, “The fastest growing products are better represented as a system of loops, not funnels. Loops are closed systems where the inputs through some process generates more of an output that can be reinvested in the input. There are growth loops that serve different value creation including new users, returning users, defensibility, or efficiency.”

The key to a successful growth loop is the customer or player reinvesting the value of the loop to drive the initial elements of the loop Pinterest does this by investing in creating content that shows up high in search engines, users then find the content and either return to Pinterest or sign up for it, Pinterest then serves related content with the user saves, thus creating more searchable content (the beginning of the loop). SurveyMonkey has a growth loop where a user signs up, creates a survey, sends the survey out, when the recipients finish the survey the are served an opportunity to sign up with SurveyMonkey, and those sign-ups restart the loop.

Just as with your financial investments, a critical element of the power of growth loops is that they compound growth. Rather than the linear approach of the growth funnel, a growth loop continuously adds to create more output and revenue. The more output that is reinvested by the user or player, the larger the output created from the next cycle. This compounding is critical as rather than creating a multitude of growth loops, you want to measure and focus on the ones that have the greatest impact.

As growth loops are holistic systems, they are also more defensible than growth funnel. In a funnel, any element of the funnel can be attacked. Growth loops, however, integrate product, channel and monetization model specific to your game and thus harder for other companies to copy.

Why loops are better

Balfour explains that growth loops change your entire business, largely for the better. The key benefits include:

You get away from siloes (product, marketing, etc) and work together. Growth loops force companies to build a system.
You invest resources in systems that are more sustainable long-term, that continue to grow on their own.
You organize your personnel and teams towards a common goal, aligning and optimizing the growth loops.

Next steps

When building your company and designing your games or products, think holistically. Understand how you will create growth loops that will feed themselves and build a long-term dominant product. With games, ensure that there are loops in the game that drive the acquisition phase.

Key takeaways

Growth loops represent the evolution from a traditional acquisition funnel to a loop that continually creates value. Loops are closed systems where the inputs through some process generates more of an output that can be reinvested in the input.
Rather than creating siloes, growth loops help marketing, product, monetization, analytics work holistically.
A key value derived from growth loops is they have a compounding effect, they continually add value to the initial investment and thus perpetually grow the underlying product.

Highlights from ICE 2019

After spending three days at ICE, the largest B2B iGaming show in the world, I wanted to share some of the highlights. While there was nothing dramatically different this year, it reinforced several trends:

There are many red oceans

I have written many times about blue oceans and red oceans, the former being spaces in the market where your competitors are irrelevant, the latter where you are competing directly with others. In the iGaming space, there is very little creativity and almost all the companies are just trying to be a little better than their competitors. There are a few silos in the industry, and within each silo the companies are largely interchangeable. Virtually all the companies, large and small, are imitating each other and adding minor twists around the fringes. The concern with this situation is that in a red ocean it is very challenging to maintain your margins and generate long-term growth.

Content as a commodity

The iGaming industry is evolving to a position where content is becoming a commodity, in part driven by the red ocean mentality. Technology and globalization is also contributing to this situation, as the barriers to entry are exceedingly low for content development. A good artist and designer anywhere — Chicago, Bangalore, Vilnius or Jakarta — can create a beautiful slot. While math is critical, there are many great mathematicians who can make the beautiful slot into a decent game. Not only does good content flood the market, it allows operators to create their own content cost effectively and skim a large part of their revenue into machines that do not generate third party royalties.

While this problem runs counter to the concept that content is king, content is not king if it is virtually the same. Content that stands out still enjoys premium pricing and attracts more players and operators. Great content cannot be replaced with quickly made internal product. Very little content, though, falls into this bucket and most is competing for an increasingly small revenue pool.

While this situation is bad news for content creators, it is great for operators. The plethora of slot providers puts the basic supply and demand formula in favor of operators. They can negotiate more favorable royalty deals or build their own competitive machines with minimal cost.

Platforms offering zero value

Consistent with the glut of content is a glut of platforms and aggregators. In the video game space, there are many “publishers” who will license a game, take a share (sometimes very significant) and just submit the game to the AppStores, adding virtually zero value.

In the iGaming space, many people have created platforms where they aggregate slots content and distribute it to operators. The problem is that many of these platforms or aggregators have few relationships with operators, and even the operators who have integrated them put the content in the back of the virtual store. There were many stories at ICE of slots developers who have generated dollars or only cents from an integration with a platform. Just as in the video gaming space, content providers need to do their due diligence before selecting a platform.

Lots of people speaking American

For many years, G2E has been the gambling show that Americans went to while ICE was largely for Europeans, but I heard many American accents this year. Additionally, some traditionally US focused companies — Everi, AGS, Scientific Games, etc. — had large presences at ICE. It shows the US companies, particularly content providers, understand that the online real money market (which is dominated by Europeans) dwarfs the US land based market. Europe provides a great opportunity for many of these companies, though it also means more content on the market.

Not everyone got the memo about crypto

While the bloom is off the crypto rose almost everywhere, particularly tech, many iGaming companies are still operating on the momentum it had twelve months ago. Throw the word crypto on a mediocre offering and expect it to be worth an order of magnitude more. This approach is consistent with how the industry reacts and copies rather than seeks blue oceans, so I am confident that next year there will be very little crypto left and they will be chasing the next one year old trend.

The promise of virtual sports

Not all the news is bad. The quality and breadth of the virtual sports offerings is very impressive. Walking through the virtuals area was like being at a sports bar with multiple TVs showing live events. The rendered virtual sports are often better than games available for console, like Madden or FIFA. There are also some great offerings that put together video clips of live events and create a virtual event. I expect virtual sports to be a big growth area online (both real money and social) in the next few years.

Key takeaways

At ICE this year, there was little new and many companies copying each other, competing in a red ocean.
There is a glut of slots content, driving down revenue for slots providers but potentially providing a cost savings for operators.
Virtual sports represents the best opportunity for growth, as the quality of the content is improving exponentially.

Lifetime Value Part 26: My most valuable retention KPIs

I have written many times about customer lifetime value (LTV)and how it is the critical determinant of a company’s success (any company, from mobile games to retailers). A user’s lifetime value has to exceed the cost of acquiring the customer, otherwise companies cannot grow and will eventually die.

Last year, I discussed that out of the three key components of LTV – monetization, virality and retention – retention was the one most critical for success. While people sometimes focus on monetization, its impact on the long-term value of a customer is limited. Think of a retail store. Would they rather have a customer who comes in, makes a $100 purchase but never returns or somebody who comes in every week and makes a purchase ranging from $10 to $25? Obviously, they would prefer the latter. Successful businesses, games, apps, have great retention, thus creating high LTVs and allowing for more marketing spend.

While the mathematical case for focusing on retention is incontrovertible, many companies have not perfected how to measure retention effectively. Most social game companies, among the most sophisticated users of analytics, rely on measuring retention by D1/D7/D30 retention (how many players who installed on Day 0 are play after one day, seven days and thirty days, respectively). While this method is an acceptable (and sometimes powerful) way of tracking how new users are performing, even D30 retention only reflects behavior of customers acquired in the last month. It does not show how well the game or company is retaining its existing customer base.

When I was at Zynga, I came across a metric that perfectly captures how well you are performing with your existing customers, CURR (current user return rate). CURR is complemented by NURR (new user return rate) and RURR (returning user return rate). Since leaving Zynga, not only have I taken these KPIs with me, I have used them as a key focus for optimizing products. A post by Nathan Williams, SaaS Retention Metrics: Lessons from Free-to-Play Games, reminded me how important these KPIs are and how to best use them.

CURR

CURR (current user return rate) is the most important KPI to track (or at least a tie with NPS). It shows how loyal your existing customers are; you should consider CURR the inverse of churn. If your CURR increases, it means you have improved your product’s appeal to existing players or customers, if CURR declines you have made your game worse. CURR is also an excellent way of looking at how your game is performing among different segments, VIPs versus payers versus never-spenders.

To calculate CURR, you start with all the users who played the game between t-14 (14 days before today, today minus 14) and t-20 and who used the product between t-7 and t-13, what percentage returned to play between t-0 and t-6. The benchmark for a good, but not great, game is 80 percent.

NURR

NURR (new user return rate) is a great metric for understanding how appealing your game is to players you have just acquired. A low NURR shows you have a bad initial experience (or a bad traffic source), turning off many users. It is virtually impossible to acquire players profitably with a low NURR.

To calculate NURR, take all the players who used the game for the first time between t-7 and t-13 and look at what percentage returned to the game between t-0 and t-6. You can benchmark NURR at about 30 percent, though it is dependent on the type of game and platform. There is much higher variance in NURR than CURR among successful games (a game on desktop could succeed with a much lower NURR than a game on Google Play).

RURR

RURR (return user return rate) shows how many people who had churned and returned to your game stay active. It is a great way of measuring how well your game can capitalize on CRM and paid reactivation campaigns. If the number is low, you are doing a great job of bringing players back but the product is still not compelling to these players.

You can calculate RURR by taking all the players who were active at some point but did not use the product between t-14 and t-20, and did use the product between t-7 and t-13, what percentage returned to play the game between t-0 and t-6. There is also significant variance in this benchmark but I usually target 40 percent for social casino games.

Use *URR to track product performance

Once you start monitoring CURR/RURR/NURR, you should use them to understand what is working and where there are issues. If you see a significant change in CURR, it is almost certainly caused by recent product changes. Low NURR indicates either you have broken your FTUE or you have added weak sources of traffic. A low RURR indicates your CRM or reactivation team is doing a good job but you need to add product features to keep the players you are brining back.

Key takeaways

Retention is the key driver of customer lifetime value (LTV), and CURR/NURR/RURR are the most accurate metrics to track retention.
CURR (current user return rate) is your most valuable metric, the percent of your current players who are staying active. It shows whether changes in your product are appealing to or deterring your player base.
NURR (new user return rate) shows if your initial user experience is strong while RURR (return user return rate) shows if your game is appealing to players who have churned but decide to try it again.

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Non-customers who occasionally purchase or play

Non-customers who refuse to become customers

Non-customers who have not considered your industry

What non-customers mean for social casino

Key takeaways

Like this:

The traditional thinking

The new approach

Why loops are better

Next steps

Key takeaways

Like this:

There are many red oceans

Content as a commodity

Platforms offering zero value

Lots of people speaking American

Not everyone got the memo about crypto

The promise of virtual sports

Key takeaways

Like this:

CURR

NURR

RURR

Use *URR to track product performance

Key takeaways

Like this: