How Can Online Casinos Target E-sports Fans?
Posted by Harry Kane on Monday, October 2, 2017
While the U.S. may be established as the natural home for e-sports in the modern age, the global market is continuing to experience huge growth. In fact, it enjoyed double-digit expansion across a number of key metrics in 2016, while the recent IEM World Championship event reached a staggering 55 million fans through social media channels.
Clearly, e-sports boasts a huge fan base and one that is highly engaged with online entertainment. With this in mind, it makes perfect sense that online casino operators should target e-sports fans, as they look to increase their own consumer base and achieve more organic growth.
The question that remains is how online casinos can successfully achieve this goal? Let’s take a look:
1. Leverage the Gameplay
While the primary goal of playing casino games should ultimately be to win money, this alone is not enough to engage e-sports participants. After all, competitive video gaming also engages enthusiasts through the quality of gameplay, and this is something that online casino brands will need to leverage if they are to expand their audience successfully.
The best way to achieve this is to focus in innovative iterations of classic casino games, while also striving to heavily promote the modern range of virtual slots. These are often themed and offer increasingly immersive narratives, while they also deliver superb gameplay features and significant bonus rounds.
By emphasising this and focusing specifically on high quality gameplay, online casino brands can easily target e-sports fans across the globe.
2. Embrace Virtual Reality
While virtual reality (VR) has numerous applications, it is fair to say that this technology has served as a catalyst in the field of e-sports. Much of the aforementioned IEM World Championship was broadcast through immersive, 360-degree channels, which attracted a staggering 340,000 concurrent viewers during peak times.
By also becoming early adopters of VR and creating truly immersive and three dimensional games, online casinos can certainly boost their appeal among e-sports fans. This would also attract more casual gamers, once again by prioritising the overall experience rather than the basic opportunity to win money.
With a growing range of VR casino games scheduled for release over the course of the next year (virtual reality slots will become particularly commonplace), online casinos may finally be able to achieve this objective while also bridging the gap between corporeal and virtual gameplay.
3. Highlight Mobile Gameplay as a Key Differentiator
While e-sports tournaments can be played on consoles, PC’s and online, there are limitations in terms of how games can be accessed by players and fans alike. The same cannot be said for virtual casinos, however, which are also accessible through mobile applications that enable players to compete at any time and regardless of their geographical location.
This serves as a key differentiator between e-sports and online casino gaming, and one that operators can leverage to their advantage. By aggressively promoting mobile platforms and betting resources (which can now be accessed on Android after Google changed their policy on publishing apps) and sharing their key benefits, brands can engage e-sports fans and present a compelling gameplay proposition.
When combined with the previous steps, this can help online casinos to expand their appeal and successfully target ardent e-sports followers.