Josip Vrbic, MD for Seven Games, NSoft.
Before becoming extremely popular in the gambling industry, gamification proved itself in several other industries, primarily gaming – which is, in a way, related to gambling. It is driven by social aspects, psychological factors and, ultimately, a winning mentality. With today’s data analytics tools, it is easy to see how much additional value gamification brings.
Still, gamification is not something you would do randomly. The more, the better is not the case. Before implementing any gamification module, you have to deeply understand who your players are, what type of content drives them, as well as their habits and preferences. After such analysis, you can start planning how to gamify your business and what gamification elements to include.
Gamification will become an indispensable part of any gambling platform or product. Betting operators have been experimenting with different modulus, but chat options, tournaments and real-time feeds have already become standard features.
“The beauty of gamification is that operators can always find something that works for their business and apply it. It can be just one module or a combination of modules”
The beauty of gamification is that operators can always find something that works for their business and apply it. It can be just one module or a combination of modules. They can combine products and games in quests or use a gamification system across channels. Achievement is one of the most powerful psychological factors that affect our behaviour. Everything we do, we do for a feeling of accomplishment, and the whole gamification concept is built on it.
While creating NSoft’s gamification tool - Boost - we put all Xs into the equation. We can gamify the experience with Boost by capitalising on bonuses - the player feels progress while playing the games, even when the player doesn’t make the winning shots. Gamification is really all about creating layers of entertainment for the players. For operators, it is a creative way to improve customer experience and engagement. In a way, gamification builds community, as it attracts and connects new players who want to engage with a similar audience.
Is gamification useful in driving player engagement and retention, or is it overrated?
Will Tighe, Co-Founder, Bettor Fantasy.
If done right, gamification can be the answer to three major questions any business has: How can we elevate boring customer experiences into fun ones? How can we lead our existing customers toward new business-friendly behaviors? And how can we motivate our customers to fully utilize the platform’s value proposition? Gamification is the answer to these questions (and more).
MAKING THE BORING STUFF FUN
"We have to be strategic about how gamification is used to help us achieve our goals"
As with any daily fantasy sports (DFS) operator, some mundane tasks simply have to be part of our player journey like KYC verification, adding funds, etc. If presented poorly, these experiences can lead to churn. Thankfully, gamification can help. Layering gamification techniques into these mundane tasks increases the likelihood of the player completing them.
Here’s a real-life example. Growing up, I was not a fan of eating vegetables. However, getting my greens was a necessary task on the journey of life. One of the clichéd (and I would argue gamified) tactics my parents used to help me complete this mundane task was the classic airplane trick – turn the spoon into an airplane and challenge the infant to catch it in their mouth. By making the mundane experience of eating vegetables fun, my parents made it easier for me to complete the task.
This obviously isn’t a like-for-like comparison when it comes to successfully verifying a new player’s identification, but there are ways gamification can transform this boring stop on the player journey into a fun one: adding progress bars, rewarding completion and showing fun animations are a few examples. By using gamification to make the boring stuff fun, we can increase the likelihood of players completing these necessary tasks and drive retention.
"We have to be strategic about how gamification is used to help us achieve our goals"
DRIVING NEW PLAYER BEHAVIORS
Humans are creatures of habit and getting players to form new habits on any platform is difficult. For DFS operators like us, having our players enter contests year-round is a clear goal to maximise gross gaming revenue (GGR). Unfortunately, not all players get on board with the intention of doing that. There are lots of players who come on and have pre-existing habits of only joining one NFL contest a week. In changing this, gamification is just one piece of the puzzle.
One way of changing this is to present players with a daily challenge – a popular strategy implemented by traditional video games to increase player engagement and drive them towards new behaviours. The premise is simple: when the player visits the app, they are presented with the day’s challenge (complete action XYZ) and rewarded (new avatar, in-game currency, etc.) when they complete it.
This accomplishes a few key goals. For one, a player’s experience on the app is new every day and makes a gamified experience constantly interesting for a player. Second, it means companies are able to drive player behaviours in a fun way.
MOTIVATING PLAYERS TO FULLY LEVERAGE THE PLATFORM
One last real-world example. In fifth grade, our English teacher had a big poster in the classroom with every student’s name. Some names had a gold star next to them (indicative of a student being in good standing). Our teacher’s goal was to have the public-facing poster and gold stars act as a form of social currency and entice students to behave, do their homework and contribute to a good learning environment.
The gold star next to some students’ names could be interpreted as an achievement badge – a classic element of gamification. Presumably, you wanted your fellow students to know you were a good student and did everything you could to get a gold star. The data backs it up too; acquiring social currencies like the gold
star is highly motivational. People naturally want to show off the social currencies they’ve acquired. If you’re able to properly tie in the acquisition of social currencies to more user activity, then you’re naturally using gamification to drive player engagement and retention.
Ultimately, we have to be strategic about how gamification is used to help us achieve our goals. In fifth grade, plenty of students worked to avoid the gold star at all costs, lest they be known as a goody two shoes. For the record, I can neither confirm nor deny my fifth grade gold star status.
Is gamification useful in driving player engagement and retention, or is it overrated?
Yoel Zuckerberg, CPO, Soft2bet
In our view, gamification is the next step for the industry to advance to the next level. Each new website is an opportunity for a completely unique and memorable experience for players. Innovation is key in every industry.
When it comes to gamification in real-life cases, 89% of employees feel more immersed in the workspace if there are gamified activities. Also, 96% of employees enjoy gaming elements in their tasks. Therefore, it can be argued that happiness can be enhanced by 89% with gamification of all sorts.
"When it comes to gamification in real-life cases, 89% of employees feel more immersed in the workspace if there are gamified activities"
This is particularly true nowadays; there is a greater importance for companies to differentiate themselves from the competition. There are only so many ways this can be done. Reevaluating one’s products, offers, promotions etc and thinking outside the box to come up with new and interesting concepts is a great way to breathe new life into one’s offering. Soft2Bet also believes in the importance of adopting a market-centric approach in both product development and our daily operations.
The brands we build are not based on a one-size-fits-all model where each site is the same. We take all the local specifics into account and try to address local tastes and needs as closely as possible.Our analysis has shown that merging gamification with sports betting is very popular with players – increasing both their engagement and brand loyalty. One such change could be the addition of coins to replace loyalty points. By using coins, users can accumulate them as part of their balance when playing in the casino, making deposits, completing achievements and winning tournaments.
Coins can be further gamified by adding achievements, which can unlock more coins. Furthermore, long-term gamification rewards can be added, such as achievements, where users receive a cash prize when unlocking each achievement. To further gamify, operators can implement a shop system, where they can spend coins to get bonus money, free spins and free bets on sport. Thus, implementing gamification into an operator’s games illustrates the growth of player retention figures.
Successful brands lead the way to new gaming methods aimed at capturing a player’s imagination and interest. As always, it’s important to make sure your brand follows all regulatory requirements. An effective way for any company to best use gamification is to have an engine dedicated to it. Using this, one can create products that allow players, for example, to travel between different capital cities and sporting arenas virtually. Creating unique ways like this to engage customers will help grow player retention numbers, and attract them to some of your other products. Of course, you can then apply coin and achievement features to this example to further gamify – it’s all about adding layers to enrich the experience.
