The publisher of the popular game in the genre of social casino Pokerist reported last year. KamaGames‘ revenue reached $90.4 million for the first time in its history. This is 18.3% more than a year earlier. About the reasons for the growth — in our material.
“2019 was a record year not only in terms of revenue, but also in terms of profit,” he said in an interview with App2Top.ru David Burke, director of the company.
KamaGames shows continuous growth for the fourth year in a row. Moreover, as they say in the company, it is higher than in the industry as a whole (recall, according to Newzoo, in 2019 the mobile games market was supposed to grow by 9.7%).
In a conversation with us, Burke emphasizes that the main driver of growth is the products themselves, which the company deals with. And working on them (first of all, we are talking about adding mechanics) allows projects to grow further.
Among the new mechanics who performed well, David singled out:
- Casino guide. This mechanic allows the publisher to “cross” players into its other casino games, which has a positive effect on player retention.
- Betting. The feature allows players to place bets in games and discuss them in chats at the gaming tables. It also has a good effect on retention and involvement in the product.
- Referral program. It helps the company to attract a new audience. As Burke notes: “Casino traffic is very expensive, but users brought through the referral program come to us and play with their friends, staying in the game longer.”
As you can see, the company is primarily working on retention now.
The reason lies on the surface: this allows you to reduce spending on traffic and earn more on the already attracted audience.
“It is very expensive and difficult to attract traffic. There are a lot of competitors on the market who are willing to pay tens of dollars to attract a player. The competition is very high. Therefore, it is very difficult to scale by traffic,” says Burke.
This is how he answers my question about why, according to the dynamics of downloads, the company does not make large purchases. Her strategy from the outside looks like regular support of titles without resorting to large-scale UA campaigns.
“We have small volumes, but we bring the most paying and active players. It is important to understand that the casino audience is very narrow, these are not casual games. Therefore, it will not be possible to endlessly flood traffic, you have to work with a targeted approach and use non-standard approaches. We have a very strong UA department, we are developing inhouse tools for traffic analysis and evaluation. All this together allows us to work with a good ROI,” explains Burke.
In this context, it seems logical for the company to position its games, including as social networks, where you can “have a great time with your friends and find new ones.” Therefore, today Kamagames spends a lot of effort on adding social mechanics.
This year, the company is going to take up the use of machine learning more actively in order to personalize the user experience, announce a partner campaign with one of the popular American casino brands and continue expansion to new gaming platforms (last year its Pokerist was released on PS4).
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