Looking at casinos from this perspective is interesting because it can help us understand why some casinos became so much more popular than others in the past two or three years, at least in the crypto gambling industry.
To objectively determine which casinos bring in (and keep) the most players, thus performing the best, we must look past our personal opinions. At Gamblineers we’re always trying to include this perspective in our work to discover emerging trends and help identify what players want most so we can offer that as affiliates.
There are two relatively easy ways to identify what types of online casinos are performing the best. The first is looking at user engagement and conversions for different brands over a large time period to see which brands bring in the most users, what these users are searching for organically, which brands manage to keep most of these players long term and what is common among these brands. This method can be very subjective because you can mostly only test brands you’re affiliated with and you can never test brands equally because you can’t offer the same amount of exposure to every brand to see how it converts.
That’s why it’s helpful to have another indicator and a second way to identify the best-performing brands. Apart from players, another audience is looking for the best-performing brands - new casinos. New operators usually start in two ways. If it’s an umbrella of sister sites adding another brand, they usually just copy one of their own casinos and rebrand it. However, if it’s a new casino with no sister brands they usually try to copy what is currently performing best according to their research. This is another indicator of what currently drives the most traffic and the best conversion in the industry.
When these two views, the player view and the new operator view, converge, you can say with enough confidence that they at least point in the right direction.
In the last few years in the crypto gambling industry, there has been a heavy tendency towards casinos that bring something new or unique to the table. Be that in-house games, unique promotions outside the standard bonus scope, special gamification features or some other innovation. This was shown by players searching more for such brands or choosing them over others and by new brands copying these casinos and the unique features they invented.
One example of such a feature is the welcome free spin wheel that brings players a random crypto prize, usually a crypto faucet. This may not seem like anything new anymore, but that’s because many new brands have copied this feature. After all, it was included and promoted by brands that were quickly gaining a lot of traction in the industry. Now you can hardly find a new crypto casino brand (that’s not a part of an umbrella of sister sites) without it.
One thing all these brands with unique features have in common is custom casino software. It makes sense: to offer something different you can’t afford to be bound by what third-party software includes or doesn’t include. When we started comparing casinos with custom software to those with third-party software, many things popped up that were ‘slowing’ the latter down.
Casinos without custom software are bound by how the gameplay works and what information they can offer for each game. That means no unique game filtering or sorting options, no clear RTP information and no in-house provably fair games that can be played with any crypto token you can imagine. This leads us to the second deficiency - limited accepted cryptocurrencies, higher transaction fees, longer transaction times and additional costs for the casino to payment providers. In the crypto industry, where transaction speed, limits and fees are optimised to the max, all these are very important. Such brands can’t add other unique gamification features either because that would mean customising the software behind the casino platform.
Some brands, as I have mentioned before, use third-party software and still produce some unique features. However, that’s only the case for big and already successful brands that can afford to pay the software developers to change the software just for their casinos. I know of only one such brand that has managed to do this. It’s interesting to note that apparently even they saw the need to develop something new to stay on top, once again confirming the trend we’re speaking of.
While it’s hard to pinpoint precisely which features perform best or are the most sought after one thing is clear: casinos using third-party software with no unique or rare features simply can’t obtain the same results as the brands with custom software.
I feel it’s fair to point out that neither of these options is bad on its own. A casino can be completely good and valid without any such uniqueness. It’s just hard to expect results rivaling the industry’s best. On the other hand, having custom software also means a lot more work for a brand, with an in-house developer team needed at the very least.
However, this is where the industry is heading right now and I believe it’s correct to do so. Like any other industry, gambling should strive for innovation, better user experience and gamification. The fact that this requires more work and resources is not new. In the long run, this will probably set apart the good from the best even more. And that’s ok.
In the last few years in the crypto gambling industry, there has been a heavy tendency towards casinos that bring something new or unique to the table. Be that in-house games, unique promotions outside the standard bonus scope, special gamification features or some other innovation
