Jackpot Joy has shown the UK the profits that can be made with soft gaming – and now it plans to take on the US.
For an industry that thrives on innovation, it can be surprising how reluctant egaming operators are to embrace new lines. One area where many were initially dismissive is the role of ‘soft’ gaming in the online gambling sector.
But how times change, and over the past year we have witnessed operators increasingly throwing resources and marketing dollars behind colourful slots and arcade-style games.
Sportsbook giant William Hill for one has reaped the benefits of soft gaming; its arcade section contributed significantly to a rise in the firm’s profits. However, if any firm has shown how big this sector can be, it is one of 2004’s true success stories – the UK’s Jackpot Joy.
Although jackpotjoy.com has been live since 2002, it was this year that things started to take off. The site rapidly climbed into the UK’s top-10 egaming destinations and never once looked like moving. And the firm is still growing – and growing fast. eGaming Review met Noel Hayden (NH), managing director of Jackpot Joy’s owner Gamesys Limited, to find out what’s next for the soft gaming sector’s number one.
eGR: Why do you think you have been so successful in 2004?
NH: I think the key to our success has been the positioning of the product. We have been good at reaching players who have never played online and wouldn’t necessarily have been interested in a sportsbook or casino offering. In the US casinos are mass-market entertainment, but it’s different in the UK and the way we have pitched our product is more palatable to those people.
eGR: How did you get the mass-market feel?
NH: We just made the site as user-friendly as possible and didn’t pitch it as casino, which I think scares a lot of people off. I had a web design business before I started Profitable Play and we spent a lot of time on usability, whereas I don’t think the casino guys particularly thought through usability at all. Typically a lot of the sites I looked at when we started had usernames such as UB7214X, and silly things like that.
eGR: What was your target market?
NH: We looked at the National Lottery demographics and we thought ‘let’s try and build a long-term community for those sorts of people’. Rather than adopting the casino approach where you get people in as quickly as possible and burn them out in a few months, let’s get people coming back and spending £5 a week over a few years.
eGR: How would you characterise 2004?
NH: The business is growing nicely, and we have had record numbers every month. Each time we think it is going to flatten out or dip, we break our record by 5%.
eGR: Just how profitable are you?
NH: We are doing well, but with William Hill and Microgaming aggressively moving into this space, I don’t want them to know quite how much money we are making. I know they are taking this sector seriously, but certainly we are ahead of them at the moment. The profits are nice, but I don’t want to get them too excited about it just yet.
eGR: Do you think the boom times are over?
NH: I think it will definitely get more challenging. We started doing this three years ago, and now all the big software providers are coming out with soft gaming products. It’s quite a good feeling that we seem to have created a sector. Luckily we are still growing nicely, so perhaps it’s just growing the market. Those guys are good at the back-office stuff, but I’m not sure they are used to managing the same kind of audience we have.
eGR: Are you confident you can retain your market share?
NH: I’m never complacent about the competition. We keep working hard, and try to keep ahead. But I think we are far enough ahead on all counts that we will continue to grow nicely for the next few years. For example, we have just fully launched our fully-integrated mobile platform, and I believe our competition are still some way off being able to have their soft game offering on both platforms.
eGR: Tell us more about the mobile product.
NH: At launch we will have three products, but by Q1 next year we might have six or seven. We are the only company as far as I know that allows you to sign up by mobile. It is a standalone mobile offering, which also allows you to automatically set up an internet account if you want.
eGR: When will you start looking overseas?
NH: It is something we are keen to do, but the main constraint is the technology. To do the whole thing properly, you need to have a completely multi-lingual offering in terms of all the games and the back office, which is at least six months’ to a year’s worth of work.
eGR: And what about the US?
NH: We are close to opening the doors to the North American market. We have done a lot of work on localisation, ensuring all the text is right, and we have done a lot of work on reskinning the content to give it more of a US feel. We have done our homework and are now at the stage where we need to open the doors, get some customers in and see what they think of it.
eGR: Do you think you can make a big impression there?
NH: It would be nice if we could make the same impression on the US market as we have in the UK. My background is in free-to-play gaming, and in 1999 we built the biggest gaming community in the UK without spending a penny on advertising. It was done through viral marketing and we eventually built a network of over 350,000 players. We will have a look at doing some clever stuff like that in the US market and see what happens.
