A game that was made by a startup company was chosen as the next game for America’s biggest social casino company.
Bagel Code (CEO Yun Il Hwan made an announcement on the 26th that America’s Big Fish will officially release Bagel Code’s mobile social casino game ‘Vegas Party Slot’ in North American markets in January of next year.
Big fish made $161 million (about 180 billion KRW) in sales with just its mobile social casino game ‘Big Fish Casino’ in last year. According to market research company called App Annie, Big Fish’s market shares in mobile social casino markets within in the U.S. ranks second overall with 9.9% in 4th quarter of 2014. Number 1 is Caesars Interactive, which is an alliance of many affiliate games such as ‘Slot Mania’, ‘House of Fun’, ‘Caesars Casino’, ‘WSOP’, ‘Bingo Blitz’, and others. Considering this, Big Fish is practically the biggest social casino game company in North America.
Big Fish is planning to market Vegas Party Slot as a sequel of Big Fish Casino. Bagel Code has started soft launching of Vegas Party Slot within the U.S. since July. Soft launching is a type of test of uploading games to app stores without any marketing.
“Normally retention of social casino game is 5 to 10% in a month. However Vegas Party Slot’s retention is coming at a higher rate.” said President Yun Il Hwan.
Bagel Code was co-established in 2012 based on developers from KAIST and Pohang University of Science and Technology.
In its early days, it received support from Nexon’s startup support program called Nexon and Partners Center (NPC). Bagel Code has been targeting North American markets ever since it was planning on games to enter social casino markets. It even hired experts from Las Vegas that actually designs casino games and assigned part of project.
It worked on designs such as graphics and others in the U.S. and England. In South Korea, development team of about 20 people are in charge of main planning and development. It is known that Big Fish thought highly of Bagel Code’s ability to implement social functions. There are about 20 types of casino games that are combined with social functions in Vegas Party Slot.
“There are not many companies that can implement both social and casino. We’ve designed Vegas Party Slot as a mini-version of Las Vegas so that gamers can enjoy casino games while communicating with each other and feel different kind of fun from that.” said President Yun.
Social Casino is a genre where one can enjoy actual casinos such as slots, poker, and others through webs or mobile. Global markets are worth about $3.48 million (4 trillion KRW) this year, and North America, Europe, and China are major markets. In South Korea, Doubleu Games is a major social casino game company. $5.86 billion (6.7303 trillion KRW) was gathered for Doubleu Games’ stocks for public subscription that was recently listed on South Korea’s stock market.
Staff Reporter Kim, Siso | siso@etnews.com
