Who needs casinos when you have Instagram?

Combining games of skill and social media is the million-dollar formula to hook millennials, according to Myles Blasonato, Creative Director of Royal Wins Pty Ltd., speaking in a panel at the iGaming Summit held yesterday at Global Gaming Expo (G2E) Asia.
“The video game industry is dominated by youth, and this audience wants skilled games, social games,” said Blasonato in his opening remarks.
“As an industry we must collectively innovate to entice these players, or else stagnate.”
According to Blasonato, 30 per cent of the global workforce in 2016 comprised millennials, and predictions have it that such number will increase to 50 per cent by 2020.
In a comparison with global online casino players, the CD pointed out in a slide that the number of players amounted to 49 million people in 2016, while the number of casual gaming players was estimated at 900 million over the same period.
Blasonato further said that key strategies targeting the younger market ball for both to reach out to pure games of skill by giving players the option to bet on their abilities and “make money”, and to social media platforms, since millennials’ presence in the virtual world, from Facebook to Instagram, has gradually increased.
In his owns words, “millennials are lazy and want to earn an easy wage.”
According to data provide by the speaker, millennials using Facebook represented 50.3 per cent of the global population in 2016, while those on Instagram amounted to 30.3 per cent.
Drawing on the example of Instagram, Royal Wins Pty Ltd.’s CD explained that the 89 million millennials using it today spend 90 minutes a day on average on it.
Amongst other “benefits” ensuing from the platform in terms of skill-gaming-meets-bet, he claimed that it has “high average orders for conversion,” that is to say that it is an efficient means of converting usage into money.
Email platforms, too, are efficient in reacquiring users, Blasonato highlighted, and is “cheaper than social media platforms.”
“To sum up, when understood correctly, social media can be very useful in converting acquisition into retention,” he concluded.