Friday view: The importance of being 'omni-screen'

Simon Llanos, head of marketing and business development at mFortune, talks about the firm’s omni-channel approach and why it hasn’t forgotten about Java

We have always been mobile first right from our beginning to the present day to the point where we have almost reverse engineered our games for desktop. We are now an omni-screen operator to use one of the current buzzwords, but we have taken all of our mobile learning and put that onto the desktop. It’s quick and very concise.

There is nothing on our desktop games that slows the experience down. It enables us to have a seamless gaming experience so what you experience on the phones is exactly what you get online not just in terms of the gameplay, but in terms of the buttons you click on screen, the wallet and everything else. And we’re finding that is going down really well with our players and is helping extend cross-sell over multiple devices.

Our portfolio of games is much larger than we have on site at any one time and we turn things on and off based on seasonality and player preferences. We are on a two game per month development schedule at the moment, but we favour quality over quantity. We always have a good variety of slots games, but we don’t want to overwhelm people.

As time goes on the lion’s share of our users come from iOS and Android and there is no getting away from that, but there is still a decent percentage of our users that are heavy Java users. The Java side of the market is pretty much exclusive to us, and we do pretty well out of it. We make sure the games look good on iPhones, but we also make sure they look good on Java phones as well.

We support 99.9% of all devices, and it’s been very difficult for us to get that right. When you are trying to support those phones it can restrict what you are trying to do on the iPhone and Android devices. The reason we are successful is through perseverance. We want to continue to service those customers. Some of our competitors only cater for the last two year’s of devices, but there are lots of customers who are happy with their flip phone.

The market is becoming wiser to the fact that everybody has the same game, and it encourages players to move around chasing bonuses. Our players come in because they know it’s a visually immersive and fun game and they stay because we can continue to serve those kind of games. In the past our games weren’t as immersive as they are now, but we have figured out how to serve games that players really love and we are in a really comfortable place. We’ve built games that work on all devices and give a really good experience on 3G. You don’t need to re-mortgage to pay your phone bill when you play our games.