The product allows online slot players to play along with casino live streamers, replicating their bets in real time, and sharing the same wins, losses, and excitement, turning the experience back into a fundamentally social one.
The land-based casino is “one of the strongest propositions for entertainment that mankind has ever known,” Reed argued, and Livespins aims to bring that same social, entertainment-focused proposition to casino customers online.
Having come into the online gambling industry as a player in 2003, Reed said that too often he found himself sitting alone, playing a “monotone game, over and over again.”
With iGaming forecast to be a $150bn industry accounting for 30% of gaming spend worldwide in the coming years, Reed asked the audience how the industry intends to make this growth a reality, as younger generations come to hold more purchasing power than older ones over the next decade.
These generations do not know a world without online social profiles, he said, and it’s time for the iGaming industry to catch up with this fact.
In addition to the increasing time now spent by individuals online and on social media, Reed pointed out the growing importance of the live streaming industry.
One third of e-commerce in China now takes place via live streams, he said, and while this trend has barely started in the West, Reed argued this will be an industry worth hundreds of billions of euros in the near future.
This has serious implications for the online gaming industry, he argued – with slot play now the seventeenth most popular category on live-streaming service Twitch, viewers consumed 26.1m hours of slot content via the channel last month.
So – what should a casino product built to cater to social communities, and work with social media on all devices look like, he asked.At this point, Livespins made its industry debut, with a live demo of the product shown directly to the iGaming NEXT: Valletta ’21 audience.
The product uses a clear, simple interface, with a slot game taking up most of the display, and a live streamer and chat function on the side.
As the streamer plays the game and interacts with his audience via the chat, players are invited to bet along with him. The player sets their own bet amount and number of spins, and wins or loses along with each of the streamer’s spins.
Importantly, the product can be integrated with responsible gambling tools such as loss limits, as well as risk and fraud profiles.
Reed said the product promises to make slot play more dynamic and engaging, particularly among younger generations, and that it also allows for easier creation of social media content for platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
With thousands of people betting concurrently behind a streamer, winning simultaneously and therefore creating some of the biggest wins ever recorded in the history of iGaming, Reed said the potential for creating social media will allow operators to increase retention, engagement, the ability to reach new demographics, and bring down CPA and marketing costs.
Reed concluded that when catering to the future, we must think social, reliability, and authenticity, while crafting product experiences tailored toward the future generations.