Pulling a crowd: Leveraging social gaming and community building in affiliate marketing

The modern slots player is a more competitive, social animal who likes multiplayer gaming and lives in a digitally connected world.

By Fraser Linkleter, CMO at Slots Temple

The modern slot may be jam-packed with new mechanics and features and cinematic video cutaways, but strip that all away and its core is reassuringly simple. Maybe that’s why players’ tastes in games have not changed as much as you might think over the years. What has changed completely, though, is how players want to engage with gambling games. Gone are the days when playing slots was a purely solitary pastime, enjoyed in smoky casinos by gambling grannies wearing glazed expressions and horn-rimmed specs. The modern slots player is a more competitive, social animal who likes multiplayer gaming and lives in a digitally connected world. Sure, some players still prefer the solitary experience, but increasingly others want to interact and engage.

It is these connections between players that fascinate us at Slots Temple, and how, as an affiliate, we can use the communities we build to create true marketing ‘happenings.’ Social interactions and community building is hugely important right now and we’re seeing much more demand for this type of engagement within the slots industry. But the social element of gambling games is nothing new. Poker has always been as much a game about social interaction as it is about strategy. The development of peer-to-peer software in the late 1990s that allowed poker players to play and chat online must go down as a major moment in the history of gambling. In the 2000s, social gaming on social media platforms like Facebook took this to a new level, creating clever new engagement mechanisms. “Gamification” was born. I suppose this is where we come in. Slots Temple is a platform that hosts more than 10,000 free-to-play slots from some of the industry’s most exciting game studios, including Relax Gaming, Push Gaming, ReelPlay and 4ThePlayer. And we’ve built a community of players that compete against each other to get to the top of the leaderboard and win prizes. Recently, we received a license from the UKGC to offer real-money cash prizes for our tournaments. This was a game changer – quite literally. Not only does it add value to the overall player experience, increasing engagement and the incentive to enter tournaments, but it also creates new dimensions in our ability to market new games to the slots player community. By using free-to-play tournaments with big cash prizes to celebrate the release of new games, we can generate a real buzz around game launches, turning them into real special events and a real marketing asset for operators. The true value of social gaming is that it can create vital player communities, and these affiliate communities should be an integral part of any operator or developers’ strategy. In the meantime, we’re building an enhanced level of social dynamics within our tournament products to enable players to interact in new ways with both friends and other players. As an industry, we should be looking to bridge the gap between players, game developers and casino operators in ways that are interesting, informative, and original.

Join us: 14 – 18 November 2022 MALTA

Being one of the first European countries to regulate the gaming sector, Malta is a hub of global business. The island is an obvious choice for SiGMA’s presence in Europe and a strong foundation for the field’s future. With a plethora of prospects for both investors and entrepreneurs looking to shape the future of this multi-billion dollar business, Malta Week will bring together industry giants among the affiliates, operators, and suppliers of the gaming sector. Our networking activities, including the extra cultural excursions, dinners, and networking drinks are solely open to Premium and Platinum ticket holders. Choose your ticket type .