Clickfun and Betway partner for real money slots
Social slots operator to move into egaming " development of real money slots known to be at an advanced stage.
Clickfun Casino is to launch a real-money slots offering in partnership with Malta-licensed egaming operator Betway, eGaming Review‘s sister publication Social Casino Intelligence can exclusively reveal.
While no official timescale has been announced for the launch of the egaming offering, SCi understands that development is at an advanced stage. Clickfun’s Facebook offering currently attracts 0.78m MAU, and is consistently ranked in the highest-grossing apps on the social network. It recently announced the launch of an iOS offering, with an Android variant set to follow.
Speaking exclusively to SCi, Clickfun co-founder and CTO Daniel Fiske (pictured) discussed the convergence of real-money and social casino, and outlined his thoughts on how the two industries would connect:
“We’re in a great position for convergence and I think we feel we are well-positioned on both sides,” Fiske said. “You see Zynga, who are huge and can pretty much do what they want, and then you’ve got the real-money businesses who are acquiring the social casino operators, or trying to develop for the other side, and I think there’s a big disconnect there.
“I think where we are going to converge won’t be so much through social moving into real-money, because there are huge risks for operators who try to do that, but in taking real-money and making it more social as I think that’s where the greatest opportunity lies,” he explained.
Clickfun’s new partner Betway is an egaming operator based in Malta, with offices in Cape Town, Guernsey, Stockholm and London. The company was founded in 2006, and currently runs the Gnuf.com brand alongside its main site, and holds Spanish, Danish and Italian operating licences.
The deal comes less than 24 hours after Zynga announced it had partnered with the egaming operator bwin.party to launch a real money gambling offering, due to go live in the first half of 2013. The revenue share agreement will see Zynga’s cash poker site join bwin.party’s poker network, while the companies will also collaborate on the development of FarmVille-branded slots.
Commenting on the similar deal Fiske explained that the deal was likely to spark a series of similar partnerships: “This partnership is another example of the convergence between real-gaming and social-gaming outfits, with many more sure to come,” he said.