GamesBeat: Do you get all the usual benefits of having a suite, then? Do players hop from one game to another a lot?
Walcott: Oh, totally. Not that we care that much about what AppData says, but when you look at daily active users (DAU) for our company, you’re really seeing our DUU, our Daily Unique Users. Whereas if you’re looking at a Zynga and you see, oh, this says they have 240 million people who played their games this month — in reality, it’s maybe 150 million played their games this month.
With our app, our numbers look smaller relative to other companies that have multiple games. But our customers will end up playing maybe two-and-a-half to three games per day when they play our games. We’ve got 22 different slot games, three video poker games, roulette, blackjack, [and] three flavors of poker. We’ve got 30 games on our site right now. That’s the cool part about having a casino. You come to the DoubleDown Casino — we want you to feel like you’re in a Bellagio experience, a quick fix when you can’t get to Vegas. You’ve got all these opportunities to play any sort of games out there.
Probably one of the reasons we monetize better than others is that…if we had, say, one game — if we were just poker, for instance — if you wanted to give us $3 dollars to get 150,000 chips, you could only use them for the one game. With ours, you can use them on a bunch of different games. Let’s say you get bored with our 22 slot games. You know there’s going to be another slot game coming next month, and hopefully it’s going to be new and innovative and something that’s attractive to you. Even if you don’t use all your chips today, as we launch new games, there’s going to be another compelling reason for you to use those chips soon.
GamesBeat: And then IGT came along here?
Walcott: Yeah, they threw down a few coins [laughter]. It’s an interesting topic to talk about. My first day at the company was down in Vegas, back in November of 2010, meeting with different casino operators. The goal was to get the word out about who we were. Even though we weren’t for sale at the time, and we weren’t looking to raise an investment, we were getting our name out there so that when we were ready to look for an investment, people would be familiar with who we were and what we were trying to do. As we became more and more successful, we realized what a giant asset we had on our hands.
There were a lot of companies who were interested in us. The obvious players were the casino operators just because we had a very like-kind product. Also the games companies because we have an incredible user base, we have a great studio, and we know how to monetize our users. Then obviously companies like IGT, who are historically in the business-to-business space, who have an incredible amount of slot content or casino gaming content on their own.
We started talking to the guys at IGT in October of 2011, and we realized very quickly that there was a synergy that could happen there. In addition, they were very excited to find that we were profitable as a stand-alone company, so regardless of what the synergies were, a deal made sense.
IGT is an incredible developer of casino-style content. I don’t know the exact stats, but they have something like 50 percent market share in slot machines in the U.S. and, I think, 80 percent of video poker. The reason they have that is because they have incredible developers there that build great content. We just recently launched a game that was developed by the guys at IGT, and you’re going to see a couple more of those coming next month as well.
The first game we launched, which was Da Vinci Diamonds, did incredibly well on our site. Partly because it’s got a brand that’s been established for the last 10 years within the real casinos — it’s in every casino on the planet. It’s got mechanics that, fortunately, IGT has patented, so it’s a protected technology out there. People come to our site and see it, they say, oh, I like to play that game. The experience is very different, obviously. On our site it’s just virtual currency. There’s nothing you can win.
Like most social game companies, 97 percent of our users play for free their entire lives with us. Only 3 percent or so are paying money, and the reason they pay is to get the experience and the thrill of feeling like they’re a high roller. Being able to get the bigger zeroes. Instead of playing with 1,000 chips per spin, you get to play with a million chips per spin, and that’s fun.
It kind of goes back to the old days of pinball machines, where if you had three pinball machines that were exactly the same, one might let me score 100 points, but I’d way rather win 100,000 or a million points. But a trillion’s too many. There’s a sweet spot. It’s not just more zeroes…users understand what it feels like to be a millionaire, and there are billionaires in the world, too, so you can get up to a billion dollars. But if you’re making them a trillionaire, it just becomes a noise and a nuisance at that point. There is a sweet spot. We try to figure out the math of where the economy should be. That’s one thing we spend a lot of time on.