Simplicity is key to the success of in-house game studios according to the latest episode of the Entain Voices podcast.
“I think what we do very well here with the content that I’ve seen is that we produce games that are easy to understand,” explained Craig Turner, Head of Studios for Entain’s in-house studio CR Games.
“There’s a lot of complicated games out in the market that don’t necessarily perform well because when you go into it, within the short amount of spins that you’re probably going to have, you have no idea what’s going on.
“What we’re seeing in the market currently is that more simple games with lower bonus frequencies and more base game modifiers, that’s what’s performing at this point, especially if we look at the UK market.”
Entain’s Director of In-house Studios, Ben McDonagh, agreed with the sentiment, adding that the broadest market for slot games is the casual player who “wants to be entertained and wants to feel they’re not being duped”.
Entain currently boasts three in-house studios, Turner’s CR Games, which produces games for the UK market, indie-game studio Vertical Games and Win Studios, which is focused on games for an international audience.
According to Turner, a benefit of being under the Entain umbrella, which includes brands such as BetMGM, Ladbrokes and Coral, is that the in-house studios have access to aggregated customer data from Entain’s B2C arm.
Turner said: “In terms of how it can help us with game design, we know, on average, how many spins we would expect a player to do on a game and how often they’re more likely to play that game.
“We can now look at male profiles in our games that target those players. If we know we’ve got a player that will only do an average of 80 spins per game, I know that I need to deliver them some value or show them something within those 8- spins to give them a reason to come back.
“So we can build our roadmap around the data that we’re provided with. It’s a massive benefit, not just the fact that we’re looking at the in-house studio data, but the fact that we can see what our competitors are doing and base our maths profiles on that data as well.”
