Disclaimer : All points of view presented in this article are of my own.
Retention is the name of the game, and we’re going to be analysing it today. More specifically, we’re going to be analysing retention in social casino games.
Why Social Casino?
Well, other than the fact that it happens to be one of the rising game genres in the industry, not to mention one of its biggest stake holders (Playtika) acquiring game studios (Wooga and Seriously) that make games from other genres. I cannot help but wonder what’s in store for this genre.
What’s interesting to note is that social casino games tend to focus a lot on meta-game features to engage and retain players. In fact, there has been a noticeable shift in the number of meta-game features in social casino apps (Especially Playtika) from 2018-2019. Many of these features are mini-games or challenges (Where players need to complete an objective within a certain time).
So, how exactly do these games retain their players and maintain really good retention rates for their games? To do that, let us try and understand the industry standards for retention in social casino games.
Retention Standards in Social Casino Games
According to the Benchmarks Report by GameAnalytics (2019), top performing casino games are among some of the games with the highest retention rates across D1, D7 and D30. To give you an idea,
Day 1 – Around 38% for top performers with median around 32%
Day 7 – Around 18% for top performers with median around 12%
Day 30 – Around 9% for top performers with median around 6%
I know for a fact that I would be ready to give up an arm and maybe even a leg for these retention numbers. So, how exactly do social casino games manage to get such great retention rates?
What We Are Analyzing And How – The Good Stuff!
Basically, the idea here is to deconstruct and identify the features used by social casino apps and figure out which of these feature could contribute to Day 1, Day 7 and Day 30 retention numbers.
And in that spirit, we will be studying not 1, but 2 of the top performing social casino apps which have been thriving and doing pretty well in this genre. The games we’re going to be analyzing are,
Slotomania and Huuuge Casino have been consistent performers in the social casino slots both in terms of downloads and revenue. In fact, they occupied the top 2 spots in the market for both Downloads and Revenue in 2018.
Feature Breakdown based on Day
We’ll try to list out the features based on their frequency, and in turn try to understand how they contribute to engagement and retention metrics of Day 1, 7 or 30.
Day 1 and D2D
Slotomania
For D1, Slotomania introduces a lot of features that reinforce logging into the app via special bonuses, quests and live operations. Playtika seems to focus on teaching the player to come back to the game by enticing them with bonus and some meta-game features like time limited quests and daily challenges.
What’s interesting to note is that, in the tutorial/FTUE of Solotmania, they teach the player to spin slots (Which is the core game), and follow it up with the meta-game features like the Daily Dash (Daily tasks), Sloto Quest (A quest based on a saga map which gives players specific objectives to accomplish in specific slots) and also teaches them to collect the Special Bonus, which they return every 4 hours for.
Some of their other features and frequency can be seen below,
A quick brief on these features,
Mega Bonus – Mega bonus rewards a player with a spin the wheel with increased rewards. Every 5th special bonus is a Mega Bonus.
Lotto Bonus – The Lotto Bonus is another type of a incentive to collecting special bonus. A player gets a Lotto Bonus on collecting special bonuses for 4 days in a row (Lotto Bonus is activated on the 4th day). Lotto Bonus gives a random multiplier on the special bonus that can give upto 200x multiplied special bonus.
The next couple of features aren’t focused on D1 retention, rather focusing on D2D which gives the player multiple reasons to visit the app on a daily basis.
SlotoClub Cash Back – The cashback is a perk of the ‘SlotoClub’ feature, where a player gets a fixed % of the coins they spend in non-winning spins on a daily basis.
A player can join the SlotoClub by earning the SlotoClub pass, which the player can earn from getting 10,000 Club points. Club points can be earned by doing various activities in-game. The feature is nicely explained in the in-game video in the app.
SlotoClan Activities – When the player is part of a SlotoClan, they get to earn various rewards by doing daily activities like spinning in the slots, completing Daily Dash and a host of other activities.
The additional perk of the SlotoClan is that, progress made by other members of your clan contributes to your progress to earn the rewards in the clan. Which gives all the more reason for players of a tight-knit clan to login and play everyday.
Live Operations: Slotomania also runs different types of 1 day live-operations type event where a player can earn bonus XP to level up faster, or reduced timers to collect the Special Bonus so that you can get that Mega Bonus that much faster.
Aside from these activities, Solotomania also frequently runs mini-events that last for a span for 2-4 days atleast twice a month. They have a good portfolio of mini-games which gives them a variety of content to reskin and cycle through for their monthly releases. I will be definitely exploring mini-games/events in much more detail in another article in the future!
Huuuge Casino
It is no surprise that if Huuuge is occupying the number 2 slot in the downloads and revenue chart, it is only because whatever they are doing to retain players is working.
Similar to Solotomania, once can notice that for Day 1 and D2D retention, Huuuge also emphasises on rewarding players with coins/soft currency frequently, and combining that with some meta-game features in the form of daily tasks and timed challenges.
One difference in Huuuge when compared to Solotomania was that in the tutorial/FTUE, the game only focussed on teaching the core game and not so much on the meta-game features.
A list of the features and their frequency of occurrence (roughly),
A quick brief on some of these features,
Betty Bonus – Similar to the Special Bonus in Slotomania. Free coins for the player to collect every 15 minutes.
Missions – Similar to the Daily Dash feature in Solotomania. Missions in Huuuge gives the player new tasks to perform on a daily basis.
Shop Bonus – Huuuge and Slotomania have an interesting behaviour which rewards the player with free coins for visiting the in-app store. By dangling the prospect of free coins to the player, it is very likely that some of these bonus collections did eventually lead to a conversion. A pretty neat trick!
Billionaire’s League – These are the player clans in Huuuge. Players get to do various tasks every day to earn currency and participate in weekly tournaments.
Huuuge Pass – The Huuuge Pass, when I checked it out earlier this year, was a feature in Beta.It was a time limited challenge of tasks which the player had to finish within a certain time. The reward was an exclusive profile ‘frame’ that would appear around the player’s profile.
Green Jade VIP Pass – A paid VIP pass which rewarded a player with hard currency and soft currency everyday for 30 days. Basically a player would get maximum value out of this pass if they logged in every day that the pass was active. Win-Win for Huuuge and the player!
Live Operations – Huuuge also had pretty active live operations which ran events, reward and level up multipliers and milestone challenges which rewarded the player to login to the app and play.
Day 7
Slotomania
To bring back players on a weekly basis, Slotomania depends heavily in task based meta-game features.
By giving the playing specific tasks to do every day leading to a reward payout around the 7th day, the app manages to engage players fairly well on a weekly basis.
Some of the other ways Slotomania engages players on a weekly basis are,
A quick brief on some of these features,
Daily Dash Bar – The Daily Dash bar is an extension of the Daily Dash feature, which basically rewards the player with milestone rewards (Around 3rd day and 7th day) for completing the daily tasks.
Most of the time, these rewards are Card Packs that are part of the collection feature.(More details about this coming up!)
Boosters – Boosters which give the player boosted rewards from collecting the various bonus in place, XP booster for faster level ups (And faster content unlock). The boosters are conveniently either 3 day or 7 day boosters.
SlotoClan Rewards – As mentioned before, the daily activities of the members of a Slotoclan builds up to a reward payout within a week’s time. The time for earning a ‘Key’ that unlocks the chest of rewards expires in 7 days.
Tournamania – Tournamania is the weekly directed tournament in Slotomania where players participate in a leaderboard on specific slot machines.
SlotoClub Pass – As mentioned before, along with the cashback perk, SlotoClub pass also gives player access to exclusive content like slot machines, boosted sales and much more.
SlotoQuest – The saga-map node based directed quest feature run by Slotomania. Player has to undertake specific tasks in specific machines to earn rewards.
Huuuge Casino
Huuuge Casino does not quite have the same buffet of features like Slotomania does, but they still have a couple of tricks up their sleeve.
Here’s a list of features that Huuuge utilises,
A quick brief on some of these features,
Billionaire’s League Events – These events are basically player clan leaderboards that rewards Clans with the highest “League Points” . These events reset on a weekly basis.
Huuuge Pass – The Huuuge pass makes an appearance here again, for the sole reason of it spanning over multiple days.
Daily Login Bonus – The Daily Login bonus with a multiplier (up to 25 days) helps player collect more free currency for login by increasing the multiplier for every consecutive login.
Day 30
Slotomania
For D30, Slotomania has used a mix of collection mechanic based features and monetisation features which is beneficial to a player who spends more time (and more money) in the app.
With a gacha based collection feature that is also time limited, Slotomania can engage players for relatively longer duration and reward their persistence and purchases with monetisation features.
Here’ a list of features used by Slotomania,
A quick brief about these features,
1. Slotocards Album – The Slotocards album is Slotomania’s long term retention feature. This feature is based on a gacha-collection mechanic, where players have to collect cards to complete the album.
Each card belongs to a ‘Set’ that is usually themed based on a slot machine in the app. Each collection has around 10-15 cards and there are around 15 sets to complete the entire album.
A Slotocard album lasts only for a ‘Season’, which is around 45 days. Cards are dropped on spinning, where the number and rarity of the cards depends on various factors.
2. Slotocards Album and SlotoClans – By now, it’s kind of obvious why SlotoClan appears in almost all 3 metrics of D1,7 and 30. With a social feature that is rooted in cooperation like Slotoclans, there is a lot of potential for engaging players for a long duration starting from Day 1.
With the Slotocards Album, Slotomania taken added another feature on the hat of the usefulness of SlotoClans, by letting players earn special cards that can only be acquired via the reward chests in slotoclan rewards.
3. Piggy Bank – The Piggy Bank is a monetisation feature that rewards the player for spending time and coins in the app. Every time the player makes a spin, a small portion of it goes into the Piggy Bank. The Piggy Bank can be broken anytime for a fixed price of USD 2.99.
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However, the kick is that the more time you spend in the app, the coins the Piggy bank accumulates, and hence a player gets more value out of the breaking the Piggy Bank. So for any long term non-payer who is on the verge of making a purchase and is not fully convinced of value, the Piggy Bank comes out as a very tempting offer for a first purchase!
4. Stamp It! – Stamp It! is another monetisation feature that rewards the player for making purchases. For every purchase the player makes, they earn a stamp. Earn 6 stamps in a month to receive a coin reward that is based on a fixed % of the total purchase value made to earn those 6 stamps!
Stamp It! is designed for players who are already regular payers, but adds more value by giving them an incentive to keep making purchases. For a payer who is at their 4th or 5th purchase, Stamp It! could be what decides whether they make those last 1 or 2 purchases!
5. Rewards Program – The Playtika reward program rewards the player across all Playtika apps with bigger collection bonuses, bigger store rewards, extra slotocards etc. These benefits vary from app to app and gives a player to play within the Playtika ecosystem.
Huuuge Casino
Huuuge Casino does not have the same spread of features for D30 like Solotomania does, but it does have some other features that can still cater to long-term players.
Here’s the list,
A quick brief of these features,
1.Billionaire’s League Mastery – For players who are in clubs, these refer to the different ‘tiers’ of leagues in Huuuge. There are several tiers (Gold, Platinum, Diamond etc.) that a league can climb through. There is tough competition in the leaderboards between these leagues. Players can earn more rewards higher up the ranks.
What’s different about the League system in Huuuge from Slotomania is that Huuuge promotes Player vs Player based competition whereas Slotomania does not. Which is very interesting to say at the least.
2. Green Jade VIP Pass – The VIP pass makes an another appearance here since it lasts exactly for 30 days, which kind of gives away it’s true purpose. That by teaching the player to login everyday for 30 days. From the 31st day, the player is pretty much invested and hooked into the game.
Feature List Comparison
Here’s a list (high level) of features between Slotomania and Huuuge and which Day metric they are targeted,
Based on my study of these apps, I have summarized my observations into these following points,
Considering how much thought and features have been built to specifically address all the needs for a player to be engaged in the lifetime of an app. It is no surprise that Playtika and Huuuge are in the absolute top of the social casino mountain!
The Why Of Play 