As game companies like Atari and Zynga (pictured: Zynga’s Duck Dynasty Slots) shift their focus to social casino games, a new report from mobile marketing firm Optimove suggests that players of such games vastly prefer to play them on mobile devices, rather than in a browser.
Developers watching this segment of the industry should know that Optimove’s data shows mobile players make their first payment in casino games almost twice as fast as those playing in browsers — within 30 days on average, as opposed to an average 52-day delay between when someone starts playing a free casino game in their browser and when they plunk down some money.
If it seems like these games are migrating from platforms like Facebook to mobile marketplaces, this might help explain why. Within Optimove’s dataset (millions of players who had played at least one session of one of dozens of social casino games across mobile/web), 65 percent of those who played on a single platform did so on their mobile device.
Moreover, they tended to play more often and for longer than their counterparts who only played social casino games in a browser, presumably because the games were readily available on the player’s mobile device.
However, it’s interesting to note that Optimove reports no significant difference between mobile/web players in either conversion rates or retention rates; the only thing that changes is the frequency of play and the time-to-pay.
