Friday view: Making casino tick on mobile

Barak Rabinowitz, chief executive at bwin.party-backed gaming studio Win, on how his firm have focused more intently on mobile development

For mobile, you need to take into account the touch interface. It’s interesting when you watch people who aren’t regular casino players interact with the application, they naturally try to spin the reels with their finger instead of pushing the spin button. Obviously you need an intuitive interface and responsive design.

You need to make sure the graphics are large visually and large in terms of the sensitivity area on the screen. If it’s too small, it’s not going to help users with the best coordination or vision. Some go further than that and incorporate motion, but we haven’t done that as we see that more as a gimmick.

Naturally there’s an importance in the social interface where we’re utilising push-notifications, and we’re actually managing to drive higher engagement and retention on mobile than we are on the PC or web products. If someone downloads the app it’s right there on their phone, and people tend to respond to push notifications as the way phones are designed there isn’t a clear distinction between SMS and push notifications, and there’s nothing in the way of a spam filter to block messages, at least not right now.

Fragmentation is an issue and we intend to be on Android by the end of the year. We develop on Adobe Air, which is agnostic at least in terms of the client-side code and works with all platforms. We’re looking at Adobe Unity now, and a lot of casino companies are as well as a way of doing cross-platform development. It’s a little tricky around the art, but there are best practices that are more flexible.

Visuals are really important these days, the users are basically there to discover new content and play because they enjoy the content and the quality. That being said, some of the most successful social casino mobile applications such as Big Fish do not have extremely high-quality graphics in their content. They’re succeeding because of the social interaction they’re creating around the games, and they’re the only ones in the space doing that well. I’m sure others will soon copy it and try to emulate it, but at this point you can argue that while content is important, you’re not going to win on content alone.

It’s an arms race and everyone needs to have good content, so you need to differentiate with either social features or things like loyalty programmes to give players something extra. We’re looking to add more wild multipliers, scatters and anticipators – all things you’d associate with land-based machines and are popular with land-based customers – so a player can experience a game in a casino and when they leave, can start playing it on their mobiles and have the same experience.