Social casino gamemakers like Zynga are moving into real-money gambling. The reverse is happening as well, and a startup called BlueBat wants to help casinos move into the world of social games.
Today, Vancouver, Canada-based BlueBat is unveiling its BlueBox social gamification engine. With it, BlueBat will help casinos and online gambling game developers reach more users. In effect, BlueBox will add social features to online gambling games. The idea is to equip the gambling companies so they can more effectively compete in the game business.
Rivals include Roar Engine, Enteraction, Akamon, and social casino players such as DoubleDown Interactive, Caesars-Playtika, and myVegas from PlayStudios. But in contrast to those companies, BlueBox is focused on a business-to-business strategy. It wants to help all casino and gambling game companies by giving them a turnkey system. That system includes services for social gamification, virtual economy, credit, authorization, and dynamic analytics. It also helps developers publish games to a variety of platforms and social networks, including Google+, Facebook, and BlueBox’s own GoPlay social network.
The BlueBox engine is a communication layer between the network-specific technology and the front-end user interface in a game.
Morgan Stanley predicts that social gambling games will become a $7 billion market in the next two years. With 173 million players a month, the social casino game genre is already huge. And with legalization of real-money online gambling on the horizon in North America, the growth expected to be even bigger.
