A huge month in real-money gaming
Image credit: Bloomberg
It’s been a huge month for real-money gaming.
On July 9th, Betable announced its real-money gaming platform to the world and included fundraising from a cadre of top investors, including Greylock, Founder’s Fund, True Ventures, Dave Morin and Yuri Milner. The response was incredible, and it showed us that we had nailed a major pain point for game developers. Then, on July 25th, Zynga announced on their earnings call that they planned to offer real-money play in their games in 2013. And on August 7th, Facebook announced the first real-money game on their platform, Bingo Friendzy by Gamesys.
Capping off the month, today we’ve announced a partnership between Betable and Big Fish Games, creator of today’s #1 Casino game on iOS, Big Fish Casino.
Through Betable, Big Fish Casino will offer real-money betting to UK-based players. By migrating over a million monthly active players to Betable-powered Big Fish Casino, it instantly becomes the largest real-money slot machine game on iOS. “Mobile apps that combine social and real-money gambling are a powerful way to engage users and increase overall monetization”, said Paul Thelen, CEO of Big Fish Games. Paul’s long-term vision matches our own: real-money play can benefit every type of game developer by increasing engagement, monetization and customer lifetime value.
We wrote a month ago about how speed will crown the winner of the emerging real-money gaming market, but even we didn’t anticipate how fast things would move forward. The leader in social gaming was crowned in 18 months, but we could see a leader in real-money gaming crowned in even less time.
Big Fish Casino will have a huge advantages over competitors as a first mover to the space, but we know other developers won’t be far behind. We can’t wait to keep the updates coming over the next month and beyond!