Gamzio Mobile is carving off a slice of the growing social casino gaming space with a social slots game for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, as well as a new real money slots game for the U.K. market.
Armed with a keen eye for strategic growth and organic player-base development, which helped the company land the recent acquisition of 147k-plus liked Facebook social casino app, Go-Go Casino, Gamzio is an aggressive mobile social casino gaming experience developer committed to capturing a sizeable chunk of this lucrative market, where Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) pulled down $237M in revenues for just Q1 this year, largely from gaming payments and fees. Gamzio’s games have top-notch graphics and an artistic style that is somewhat reminiscent of top titles from Zynga, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNGA), including their viral Candy Crush game, which has over 100M MAU (monthly Active Users) and FarmVille 2 (10M plus MAU), as well as their new slots simulation game, Hit it Rich! Casino Slots.
Gamzio’s Slots-O-Luck Adventure HD (iOS 4.3 and up, compatible with iPad) and Slots-O-Luck Adventure (compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch), now released to players in 58 countries around the world, are designed like an adventure game with an open, progression-based world (Slots City) to explore. Experience points are awarded to the player for winning games played using a set amount of free coins which are given away every four hours and used as in-game currency. Coins get spent relatively fast when the player is losing and thus the opportunity to buy more coins for cash at the in-game currency store continually asserts itself, as there is no other option when the player runs out other than to wait till more are available after four hours. Slots-O-Luck maintains a 4.5 star rating on the Apple App Store and was featured twice by Apple in both the Casino and Simulation categories.
This same game design approach of generating revenue off multiple smaller transactions via a free-to-play, attractive/engaging social media-enabled environment has proven extremely successful for Zynga and it should be noted by investors that Gamzio has considerably less overhead or corporate bloat to contend with by comparison. The social casino gaming market has really been heating up in recent years, with major titles from top industry names like famous maker of real-world slot machines, International Game Technology (NYSE: IGT), now going fully digital with their own online casino games. In fact, IGT’s Double Down Casino ($500M acquisition of Double Down Interactive in 2012) ranked alongsideCaesars Entertainment’s (NASDAQ: CZR) Slotomania ($80M Playtika acquisition)in last year’s list of top Facebook titles. Social casino gaming currently dominates the top app leaderboards according to a recent report based on data extracted from Distimo AppIQ and the sector itself represents something like 20% of the footprint of the top grossing 100 leaderboards on Apple App Store and Google Play.
Leveling up in Slots-O-Luck Adventure through accumulating experience and completing other single player or multiplayer progression tasks (including social sharing) orients the players to an evolving game world, with new levels granting the player access to new casinos and new machines, the game world gradually expanding as the player levels. The ability for players to connect with Facebook and participate in rich multiplayer that is fully integrated with social media via the company’s proprietary Social Integration Systems, further enhances audience building and user retention dynamics. Frequent players will generally want to buy into different tiers of the Slots-O-Luck Adventure Slots Syndicate for a fee (generating considerable return revenues), with membership in various ranks of the syndicate doling out more free coins and spins with each tier, as well as granting bonus multipliers that speed up leveling.The background sound design is alternately exciting and/or relaxing Vegas-style music and there are tons of bonus and mini-games to keep players entertained. All-in-all Slots-O-Luck Adventure is an extremely impressive offering from a smaller company than is typical in the space, giving GAMZ plenty of upside room to move and a highly competitive product.
The company’s newest game, Casino Island Adventure – Real Money Slots! (iOS 6.0 and up, compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch), focuses on Vegas-style slots and the real money gaming side of the market, while still using the adventure framework. A big part of making the real money model work for GAMZ will be to keep up the same reliable customer service reputation they have already established and really cater to the serious gamers who will be wagering their hard earned cash and expect service to be accurate, as well as prompt. The expanded in-game feature set available thanks to Gamzio’s tight Facebook integration will continue to set the company’s products apart from their bigger rivals while broadly opening the browser-based gaming vector for further development and growth of the user-base.
With spending on mobile gaming apps nearly tripling last year to around $14.5B (SuperData Research, AppAnnie) and projections for this year of over 45% growth to some $21.5B, the roughly 173M potential MAU target market for social casino games alone is a gold mine, especially for a smaller company like GAMZ. The company understands game design and has established a track-record for creating compelling, feature-rich content that is highly engaging, innovative, and looks absolutely stunning. Given the relative newness of mobile social gambling and the on-average double revenue per user of these types of games compared to typical social games, as well as the relatively poor monetization methods and low overall retention rates of competitors, GAMZ is poised to hit the target demographic sweet spot and gobble up a larger portion of this much sought after market. Morgan Stanley has pegged a figure of around $7B by 2015 for the social casinos market alone and Juniper Research recently estimated that mobile casino wagers could hit $62B globally in the next four years.
One of the company’s big success secrets thus far has been their collaborative approach to working with other top online gaming companies and a veteran team of experienced casino game designers. This is a particular aspect of the company to keep an eye on, as the market is characterized by a lack of affiliate relations and typically rising costs per install that make it necessary to employ a diverse user acquisition strategy like the one GAMZ has developed. GAMZ comes to the table with a proven affiliate management model and the kind of ingenious monetization techniques needed maximize revenues, especially on the Facebook integration end of things. Bundle in best-of-breed predictive mobile analytics, including GAMZ’s proprietary backend player-tracking system, as well as fully player-optimized ads and real-time optimization that bypasses Apples Updates, and you have a featherweight contender in Gamzio that can easily punch above its weight class.
More info on Gamzio Mobile is available at www.Gamzio.com
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