Their primary motivation is the strong sensations they experience while playing, the positive memories from winning moments and the thrill of winning or losing. Players who are excitement gambling seekers are playing for the stimulation. The “excitement gambling seekers” cluster Below, I recap the four clusters, which you can then use to make your products and marketing better fit for your target customers. Based on how players ranked the various factors, the authors were able to create four distinct clusters that show different types of players. The five factors are ego-driven, learning, relaxation, excitement and financial rewards. While the research was about real money slots players, it shows their motivations are often non-financial that is they are not playing to make money.Ĭhen, Shoemaker and Zemke segmented slots players into four clusters based on five sets of factors, and by looking at each cluster it provides a good understanding of the people who play and monetize on social slots products. Recently, I came across an article, Segmenting slot machine players: a factor-cluster analysis by Sandy Chen, Stowe Shoemaker and Dina Marie Zemke, that provides even more insight into why people would spend money on a social casino game. The post also included information that people gamble for three reasons – economic, symbolic and pleasure-seeking – and only one of them was tied to making money. Those questions prompted me to do research before starting my position in the social casino, which led to my blog post Why would anyone buy a virtual good?. a virtual tractor) and assumed the two must be related. Moreover, I also did not fully understand why people would spend real money for a virtual good (i.e. It was, however, difficult to argue with the data that showed social casino consistently the most profitable genre in social and mobile gaming. After all, people gambled to win money, or so I thought.

When I accepted my first job in the social casino (free to play slot machines) space, I did not understand fully (or believe) why anyone would pay to play a casino game (slots, poker, bingo, etc.) if they could not win money.

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