In this episode of the Naavik gaming podcast, host Niko Vuori and guest Sean Ryan delve into the emerging category of social sweepstakes, a gaming model that barely existed as recently as 2017, but has rapidly evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry. In 2023 social sweeps generated almost $6B in revenue, and this number is expected to double to nearly $12B by next year, 2025.
What are social sweeps? When a gaming product offers users real-world prizes without the element of consideration. Removal of consideration takes place via the existence of an alternate method of entry, such as sending in a postcard, so that users can potentially receive real prizes without making a purchase.
Niko and Sean explore the mechanics of social sweeps, the regulatory challenges that come with it and the role of VGW as a pioneer in the space. The conversation also touches on the target audience, user journey, and the future potential of social sweeps in the broader gaming market.
Check out Zoot on the web. You can find Sean Ryan on LinkedIn.

We’d also like to thank TikTok for making this episode possible. In a dynamic gaming market where a majority of games fail within three years, TikTok has become a critical partner in helping games achieve long-term player retention and substantial revenue growth.
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
Niko: Hello and welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Niko Vuori. Today, we have a very special episode for you. We are going to do something that we rarely get to do in the gaming industry. And that is to cover a brand new gaming category that barely existed as recently as 2017, but has grown into a multi-billion dollar opportunity in just the past few years.
Last year, this new category generated almost 6B revenue, and this number is expected to double to nearly 12B by next year in 2025. And I'm willing to bet that most of our listeners have never heard of this category. Just like I hadn't until fairly recently, the category we'll be talking about is adjacent to social casino and real mini gaming, both huge categories, of course.
On their own merits. But what we are talking about is something that has been just a feature of many games for decades, but has now become its own thing. And that thing is called social sweeps. What are social sweeps, you ask? Well, to find out, we have invited a return guest and friend of the pod who is going after this opportunity with his latest startup Zoot.
So without further ado today, I'm excited to welcome back. Sean Ryan, the founder and CEO of Zoot, to the show. Sean, welcome back to the pod. Great to have you here.
Sean: Thank you, Niko. I'm excited to be here. Great to reconnect again, as we both moved on to our next startups and hopefully these will go incredibly well.
Niko: Yes. Better than the last one, at least. So with that out of the way, let's get right into the episode. And I know you've been on the pod before, but we always like to start with the background. So let's go over that again. You've got a very storied and deep connection to the gaming industry. So I'd like to go over that and share that with our listeners.
Sean: Thank you, Niko. One of the few benefits of being on the older side is that you've got a long career in, uh, to talk about. So I was a gamer from day one, which is back in space, when you had arcade games, so on machines and malls, so that was space invaders and asteroids. Then up through the Atari 2600 and Intellivision up through the Apple two and wizardry and then up in the university.
And again, this all happened before the internet and before smartphones. So then I really wanted to be in gaming as a business. Couldn't figure out a way in after banking and retail went to business school and found my way to Sega soft networks, which was one of the original. Multiplayer game entities that started just as we went from dial up modems, which maybe people on the podcast don't remember, to broadband, which enabled a much richer form of gaming.
So Sega soft had a product called heat. net. It was one of the early players in this space, one of the early companies. I was there for two years while we tried to build this entirely new business along with some competitors. Then I took a break, went to music for seven or eight years, which again, was the same theme of my career, which is areas that are physical going physical media, going to digital, that was music at a company called Rhapsody.
And then came back, started a avatar and virtual world company called Mies, today you would call a Metaverse company because your valuation would be higher. At least it would have been two years ago.
Niko: Two years ago, come on, come on, Sean.
Sean: That's true. That worked a little bit, did well in some ways, but we didn't have a revenue model and it was just as the smartphone So at the same time, we spun out a social casino company called Open Wager. I left and went to Russia for a year in Moscow to run a social media site there and help them, modernize their platform stack at a company called LiveJournal.
Went to News Corp for six months in order to help them in their active game business. And ended up at Facebook in 2011, where we were just starting the gaming platform. And I was the leader of that and was, and stayed at Facebook for 11 years, where many of the original social game companies started before they moved to mobile.
So I ran that and additional divisions of Facebook for a long time. At the same time, my former social casino company had fallen apart a bit and been sold. So a company called VGW, we will come back on this VGW is the leader in the social service movement and our product was called Lucky Line Slots, which is now the number two product in the industry.
I went on state of Facebook for 11 years, gaming and otherwise payments, developer platform, a bunch of other things, and then left to do web three along with Nico and others when we thought it was the glorious future. It may be the glorious future, but it's still in the future. So we did that for a couple of years.
And then we shut that down in December, waited a week to leak our, lick our wounds and January 2nd, we started back up with what we should have done two years earlier, we had the concept, which was Zoot available at getzoot. us. And what this is, is really not a casino the way many of the players and social shoots are, but we can talk about that.
This is a throwback to the old days of shockwave. com or addicting games run by my friend, Mika Salme. Which was simple, fun to play games that. We're spun out on a daily or weekly basis. And the only difference in our case is that the revenue model is not ads. Our revenue model is sweepstakes and we can go through how that works and why we think this is a better mousetrap than some of the players in space, but happy to go through in more detail.
Niko: Alright, I mean, that is a who's who and what's what of early gaming throughout your always early. It sounds like maybe sometimes to, you
Sean: know, my wife says the same thing. And so that was one of the, uh, that was literally a discussion topic. This time is, are we too early? Are we too late? Are we just about right?
And just like the three bears, I think we're just about right.
Niko: There you go. There you go. Yeah. I mean, we've got wraps it in their addicting games. I remember. So, so Alio. So many of these and Mikasaomi of course is a fellow Finn and I wouldn't call him a friend of mine, but I certainly know, know him well.
And, we've, our paths have crossed in the past. So, okay. So a lot in common there. And also again, very early to a lot of gaming and let's see what this category looks like because it is early relatively speaking, but it's already big. Multi billion dollar business. So that brings us very nicely to the next question, which is what the heck are social sweeps?
I know sweepstakes well, we've implemented the features many, many times. So have many other gaming companies. It's worked really well as a feature inside a game, but how does it work on its own as a revenue model?
Sean: So social sweeps popularized by a company called VGW based on Australia that I used to sign off on their financial, their legal opinion when I was at Facebook, social sweeps are the idea that you have a free to play game system.
So that's the social part, which you have gold coins and that when you buy a, you buy a package of gold coins, you are then given a set of sweepstakes entries. It's a bundle, you can then choose to, uh, play that game with either gold coins or sweepstakes coins. Those sweepstakes coins have monetary value and can be won or lost.
So the closest analogy and where this runs from a regulatory perspective is that the, the usual McDonald's, you go to McDonald's, you buy a big Mac. And as part of that, you get entered into a sweepstakes and you have a chance to win something. Or for those who are old enough to remember Ed McMahon and Publishers Clearinghouse used to buy magazine subscriptions.
Those are the things on paper that come in the mail and you would get entered into a contest where you could win money or a car or things like that. So that's the basis of social sweeps, a free to play game system with gold coins attached to a sweepstakes entry system that, uh, from a regulatory perspective comes off the sweepstakes laws in the 50 states of the United States.
So there's a couple of quirks to it. One is you must have an alternative method of entry, AMOE. You must be able to send me a postcard, right? It's actually an index card and an envelope. And if you do that, we will grant you a certain set of sweepstakes entries. That is always a requirement of sweepstakes law and the usual rules that it must be luck based.
It's a, it can't be a skill based area, but. , you are able to, and you can win actual value from it, but because you don't have to pay to enter, it does not qualify for what is considered to be real money gaming rules, just to reiterate real money gaming rules, as Miko knows from his time, you must, you must put something to value up.
Luck must be the term or outcome, and you must win something of value. If any of those are not true, any of them, not all of them. That is not considered real money gaming or gambling. So in the old Zynga poker days or Zynga slots days, you would, you could put money in luck, determine the outcome yet. You couldn't win anything of value.
Sweeps is the opposite of it. Skill based games, on the other hand, are different because they're truly skill based and they do not fall under the real money gaming because they're the middle one, which was, and must be luck based and its outcome. That's the definition of sweeps. We can go into more detail.
There are various ways to play it. You have sweeps based sports books, like Fliff would be the most well known one. You have a multitude of sweeps based casino looking, uh, apps like Lucky Land Slots or Fortune Coins or Crown Coins. And then you have us at Zoot, we're in the arcade game sector, which is quite rare, and we can talk about that later in the podcast.
Niko: Well, that was a great rundown of, of the landscape and that Singapore, we actually, not only do we have the free to play system, of course but we, we also rent sweepstakes regularly. It was a very lucrative way to, to kind of juice the numbers. You couldn't run them all the time because they kind of lost their power, but, but we would run them, you know, maybe on a monthly basis, you know, every four or five weeks, give or take.
And they were a nice revenue driver. They give you a nice pop and of course we, I remember very well, you needed to send in a postcard.
Sean: Listen, Swiss fakes law is well established across the United States at the state level. Most states are pretty similar. So this is a very well understood concept.
It just has been adapted for the digital world.
Niko: Right. And that's my next question actually, which is it has existed as a concept for decades, quite, quite frankly, like, you know, pre internet, uh, like, you know, publishers clearing house, like you can go back all the way to, I mean, probably the turn of the cent, not this century, but the last century for, for some of this, as I was doing my research here, , but this, this notion of social sweeps is like the actual driver of a digital product, like I mentioned in my intro, it didn't really exist until about 2017, that was about a hundred million dollar a year business. By the kind of industry estimates that I've seen, but it's exploded to billions this year and doubling potentially into 2025 up to 12 billion in revenue.
And then, of course, you've got to pay out the prizes, right? So there's like a net net revenue piece is smaller than that, but still a multi multi billion dollar business. So what on earth has driven this? Like what happened in 2016 17 that allowed this to become its own thing and a huge category in its own right.
Sean: Well, I think we have to give credit to VGW, this Australian based firm that has done quite well within it. They have Chumba Casino, they have Luckyland Slots and they have a poker product. They're the ones who really popularized this, shot sauce of success and then doubled down on the marketing and innovation in the category.
And then, what happened was COVID hit a few years ago. And that drove the numbers up to the right. And what frankly happened is DGW is an Australian company that has to, at a certain size, report their financials at some level. And people look to see how successful this category was and what this category I'll be getting existed because this is unique to the U S maybe not unique, but it's more common in the U S so European providers and non U.
S. providers are a little bit confused over it. So then you started to see additional entrance in the area that brought a bunch of innovation and different marketing tactics, different games, so that's really what has started to drive the, the loop. Is the, you see more games, more competitors, just like we saw on social casino in 2012 and the idea that therefore it can be a growing business that appeals to more and more games.
Niko: So you mentioned BGW and you mentioned that at the very beginning, in fact, in your, in your intro to yourself and your, your career, perfect time to talk about BGW now, like who are they? It seems like they almost single handedly brought about as far as I can tell this new category, which of course now lots of others are going after.
They seemingly owned a hundred percent of a very large category that was like a mystery. Too many like you mentioned Europeans. It's a mystery to me still like I look at it and it's like, wow, where did this come from? And so very curious to hear about VGW and how they came about. What did they do initially to launch?
What product did they launch that kind of showed them like, oh, wow, there's heat here. And then they double down as you say, and, you know, And grew this into its own category, essentially single handedly or mostly single handedly.
Sean: Yeah. So I'm not the expert on them, but they were started by at the time, a young man named Lawrence Escalante.
You can follow his Instagram feed since he's done quite well. He likes, uh, expensive sports cars and private planes. So he's done very well. I remember meeting Lawrence 15 years ago when I was running the games platform at Facebook and he sent in his app and we at the time did not allow real money gaming apps and no gambling apps were allowed.
They had to be free to play only. And this felt like a middle ground and we weren't sure just like King, by the way, used to be the skill based option of this King before Candy Crush, before it became free to play. Was in this a gaming adjacent area and skill where you had small amounts of money that you could win or lose.
And so I, we, I took it to the lawyers at Facebook and I said, and we're pretty conservative. And I said, what do I do here? I've never heard of this category it doesn't seem, I don't know where, what box to put it into. And they looked at it and came back and said, Based on the legal opinion and what we believe is true, it's legitimate.
As long as he is following the legal opinion that a law firm has decided where it's legal and what is legal, you have to put it on the Facebook platform. So I did, and it was okay it never took off with the ferocity that social casino did from Platika and Zynga and others. But it was there, it was hanging around the hoop and they were improving.
They were, the team was committed to improve the game, improve the marketing. Just on Facebook. It's a web based app. We're back to web based apps in many cases, because in most cases, the app stores won't carry Sweepstake, in some limited cases they do, but the app, just the app stores like Apple and Google are still, and Android are still trying to figure out what to do here.
So, BGW deserves full credit for both. There were other players, but they were the ones who introduced it, invested, dumbled down in it, acquired more properties like lucky landslides from us and continue to grow. You know, I originally started the real money gaming business at Facebook in 2014, when we went live in the UK and in Italy and Spain with partners.
And even in those days, we barely heard about this category. It was either you were a real money or you were social casino. And both were great categories. This light lies in the middle between the two. I used to joke that it's for those family Catholic like me. It's purgatory, it's above, it's below heaven and above hell.
, and so the good news about it is not everybody understands it. The bad news about it, not everybody understands it. So you have to both from a consumer perspective and also explain it, but we've found so far, it's just a really fun category to be in. It's the growth rates are interesting and we like our approach to it at Zoot.
Niko: Yeah. You know, what's, what's really fascinating about this is, you know, most social casino games have a real world analogy, right. And, and as this social sweeps, but. In social casino, they're, they're actual games, right? Like there are slot machines in the casinos. You're playing poker for real money in casinos or, you know, at your local club or whatever, with your friends, bingo similarly, like they're actual games, right?
But sweeps is to me still doesn't, it doesn't feel like a game. It doesn't feel like something that has a real world analogy in the gaming world. It has obviously the publisher's clearing house analogy, or the McDonald's, entered into a sweeps analogy, but it doesn't feel like a game in and of itself.
So how, like, how does it work quite frankly, like we can talk about Zoot in a second, but let's talk a little bit about like looking at slots and those kinds of games, because it seems like that's where it's been adapted into the casino world and you're taking an arcade approach. So let's start with the casino world because that's, that's Like you say, it's purgatory, right?
Sean: It's between real money and social. The casino world is where the majority of the apps exist, both the existing ones and new ones that are arriving. And so in this case, it is the same idea that I can run a social casino with gold coins, no different than a Zynga Plos was or Zynga poker. That is, you can never.
Do anything with sweepstakes and you have a decent or a pretty good, casino style app that is social casino rules. If you wish to, you can move into the sweepstakes area, which allows it's still the same game. So I actually consider it to be very similar to Zynga poker and Zynga casino and Zynga slots and all of the competitors in that the difference it is you are able to purchase or be granted those, sweepstakes entries of value.
And you can put them, you can enter them into the contest. It is a luck based contest. I want to be clear on this and you win or you lose. And so it's for some people, not everybody that feels like the right exchange of value. And so it's, for those who want something different or more than sofa casino, this is that next step up.
Niko: Interesting. Interesting. Okay. And what are the things that are being given out of value? Is it, is it the usual? Is it cars? Is it vacations? Is it money?
Sean: It is most, mostly money. It is. Now, I think we're going to see as more entries come in, we're going to start to move more into prizes. There are some people want iPhones or cars or TVs or that kind of one.
Right now, the vast majority of the sites that exist out there, it is money.
Niko: Interesting. Okay. And I, I, I saw some numbers, uh, that imply that about 65 percent of the kind of money that's, you know, paid by players is then given out in prizes, give or take about 65%. Is that about right? Or does it range widely?
Sean: No, it doesn't range widely. Like anything else, you're trying to have a game that, uh, by and large is profitable, but you always want to have winners. Just like, and so redemption is a key part of this is that you're giving away prizes, whether it's money or other types of prizes, as part of the results of this contest.
That's the core part of it is that if everybody loses, then no one will play. So just like the lottery, just like all sorts of other games that are different, but similarly related, you want to be able to play something in this case that you have a chance of winning. You could win gold coins or street coins depending on what, depending on how you enter.
And so it's one of those areas that their redemptions are a core part of it. And it's up to every business to figure out how they handle redemptions and what that loss rate looks like.
Niko: Interesting. Okay. Brings up on my next question, which is who are these players? , i'm presuming it's a sub It seems like it's a very lucrative subset, but it's a subset of maybe casino players casual players or are they they their own group of people who are Unique in the sense of like you can target them For this product, but you wouldn't get them for like a social casino product, or you wouldn't get them for a poker product.
You wouldn't get them for a real money gaming.
Sean: It's a bit unclear what I would say. They overlap depending on the genre you're in appears to be quite similar. So the sports book genre tends to have young men or men who are out there. The casino genre has often the stereotypical middle aged women at zoo, we, and the arcade games, we have young men, so not that doesn't change much, so thanks. So that's. I don't think that's a radical difference. This is still a smaller category than the other bigger category. So, but what you find in this category is you're able to be more innovative on products, because you can move quickly without necessarily having to go through a regulator to get every single change approved, you can try that.
So if you look at some of the sports books that are based on sweeps, they're frankly more innovative, easier to use. They try things, they shut them down a week later, they open it up. And that's true for all of us. It's all about product innovation at the end of the day giving people an experience they'd like and might be able to win a contest in.
But at the other hand, being more innovative about how you do it. And in our case, it's about bringing what we know works in the social mobile games to this category. And in other cases, it's about making it simpler or making it more fun or more timely in a way that the classic, casino like apps in that category don't do.
Niko: It's a broader mix of people, but it's probably a smaller kind of total addressable market than something like social casino or real money.
Sean: It's too early to tell because it's a relatively new, relatively new vertical, but our adjacent vertical, but I think, yeah, I think it's still a subset. I mean, also what you have to understand is, as you know, the social casino folks.
I've had 10, 15 years to optimize their systems and they're very good at what they do. Same thing with some of the RMGFs, the DraftKings, the Sandals. They're very good at what they do. They continue to excel in the categories they're in. The social, the social suites folks are newer and in some ways more innovative, but also newer in our optimizations.
This will take time.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. We actually just literally just on, the episode dropped two days ago, Tuesday, I've recorded it last week with Danny Moy's chief strategy officer over at Cyplay. And so we were taking a kind of look at the social casino market. And obviously we were both in it a while ago.
For me, it's like since 2016. So it's a lot, a lot has changed in that kind of almost decade since then. But, but, it is interesting to hear how much innovation has happened and how sticky that category continues to be. And it's interesting that there are still like subcategories of social casino, because I do view this social suites as a subcategory of that.
Still are able to pop up like somebody has. Didn't think about this and now it's like, Oh, duh. Like this is such an obvious thing.
Sean: I've no daddy for a while. And I think side play has been executing incredibly well. So you look at that business, they continue to drive numbers up. It is not easy.
They're just running an execution play, but you also always want to keep on the lookout for innovation and in these smaller genres, skill and lock a skill and sweeps. I think you see a little more innovation than you do because those are big businesses. They're very big businesses that you don't want to innovate too much because you might make a mistake.
Niko: Yeah, and it was, I mean, the TLDR from that episode was that there are most, I mean, yes, they're trying to grow their, , player base. Yes, they're trying to do new product launches, but by and large, they're focused on their core business because why wouldn't they, if they're continuing to grow it at like double digit Kager. Go for it, right?
Sean: Like, I mean, they've been honestly the most impressive social casino company in the last couple of years. I love those guys and they have just continued to operate on a high level.
Niko: Absolutely. Absolutely okay. So let's talk about a typical user journey. I know the user journey from social casino, at least from close to a decade ago, let's talk about the user journey for a social sweeps player.
How do they come into your product or any of the other products? Products are out there.
Sean: So becoming the usual channels you'd assume. So there's a bit of social and SEO and viral. That's what you hope for, of course, but that's not enough by itself. And then you add in paid acquisition, no different than you would for social casino.
And then you throw in toward the end, either affiliate networks, which are a little bit more unique to gaming or you influencers. So I don't think it's any different. People seem to think this is radically different. You're still using these channels in different ways. You, you, redemption is part of it.
That's obviously a different part of your marketing push, but in general, it is a very similar audience, similar channels with a lot of people trying to optimize and try new and different channels, but traditional paid acquisition is, is often the way people come in.
Niko: Yeah. And, just to clarify, mobile is not an option, or like native mobile.
Sean: It's a great question. Some of it's, it's not clear. It's, I would say, my best, and I'm not the expert, we're not on apps. What I would say is, Google is less friendly than Apple. And most of the sports books seem to be able to exist like Fliff on iOS. On the casino side, it's a little unclear to me.
Some seem to get there. Some try to get there and don't it's. You know, it's these areas, even Social Casino was like this in 2012, where no one was a hundred percent sure it, where does this fit? And so right now, what I'd say is. All of us are on the web and some people, some of the competitors of this growing group have made it onto the app stores, but it's still pretty early.
Niko: Yeah. And is this something that there is clarity from Google and Apple on? Is this something that they have, because they, they. Early social casino, there wasn't really anything. And it was like everybody lies. You say everybody was figuring it out and then they got there. Right. And then there was actual clarity around it.
There were certain rules. Like you just have to follow the rules. And it was clear that those rules were written in part for this category of social casino. That sounds like it's not the case at all right now. Is this on the radar?
Sean: It's definitely on the radar, partially because these apps are quite successful and because there's a lot of marketing spend behind them and increasing usage.
But I'd say it's the way, the way this works, the journey works here is you build your initial application or your site. You go to a well respected law firm. In our case, it's Ifrah law, which is one of the gold standards in the business. They spend a fair amount of time going through your site and And making sure that it matches up with what they believe after looking at all 50 states, what can be legal and in what states.
You take that legal opinion and that is what you use to, whether it's with the app stores in some cases, your payment partners in other cases, and you follow rigorously that legal opinion. Sometimes that legal opinion needs to change over time as state laws change or the world changes, but that's what you rely on.
And then in our case, you have, for example, KYC, you have Know Your Customer, you have AML, anti money laundering laws, you have geofencing, meaning, our app under the way we do it is allowed in 45 states, but not 50. So we have to deny a few states that either have different sweepstakes laws or have passed some sort of rule against us.
So it is a state by state, it's, it's no different than what you see in real money gamut and it's no different actually in some cases, what you see in social casino, where for example, the state of Washington is quite negative about social casino.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah. No, I remember that. And it sounds like they haven't changed their mind.
Sean: So, so to answer your question, Nico, I think over time, this will get formalized and there'll be a set of checklists that if you check those boxes and follow them rigorously, as we do.
I don't think we're quite there yet, but I, I'm hopeful next year, given the size of this category and the interest in it, that we'll get there on one or both app stores.
Niko: I mean, they do follow the money. They're not, they're not allergic to money, Apple and Google.
Sean: Hey, we've, listen, we've seen this. If you look in the business, you and I used to be in a little bit.
The rise of cash solitaire and cash bingo games have, which didn't exist three, four years ago are now prevalent in the top 10. So clearly markets change, the world changes and the app stores come along with it. Not always. They're not always at the forefront. They come, they come along when they see usage and they see where the puck's going, they tend to come along.
So I'm pretty optimistic about it.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, a 12 billion category by revenues, you know, and if they get to take a third of that 30 percent cut, you know, that's worth it. Right. Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit of you. You alluded to the regulatory environment. I want to dig a little bit deeper on that.
One of the reasons many. Free to play developers, social casino developers didn't want to go after any of these things that have anything to do with regulation is because regulation is a real pain in the ass and you know, know your customer and anti money laundering. All the things you mentioned are quite painful to do, especially if you're a smaller startup.
And yes, when the opportunities there, of course. You go after the opportunity, but at the same time, it's it's a lot of hoops jump through. So that's both a blessing and a curse, right? It's like it's going to deter some smaller developers from going after it. At the same time, you still have to go through those hoops, right?
So talk a little bit about the regulatory environment. What are the laws surrounding you've alluded to? To it a couple of times, but I want to go just a little bit, a little bit deeper. Um, how do you navigate that regulatory environment? How do you make sure you have that geofencing working on a state by state level?
Sean: It's not as hard as you'd think these days. You have a bunch of respected law firms that go through and give you a quite long legal opinion And it says what you could do and not do So it says you can go on these states and not these states. You have to have KYC and AML. You have to have these types of things.
And so, and they've done this many times and they're well respected. And then you make sure you follow it. And so we went out and got that. Then we looked at the app and said, okay, we now need to find partners, for Geofence, KYC, AML, and Odyssey payments. And that's a little bit longer and you're right.
It is not as quick as just putting it up an app store and calling it a day. It is more work involved and there's more rigorous around the due diligence involved of your partners and them of you. Lots of paperwork to fill out. Not easy to get a bank account even when you're in this category. It's taken me a while, so yes, there are more hoops in this one and there should be. This is the, there's real money involved. There should be more hoops. And there should be the types of protections that we have in place, and almost all the sweeps players have, but it takes longer months, not weeks in order to get this done and continue to refine it as things change.
But I wouldn't say it's impossible. There's probably 50 or a hundred players in the space now and more coming. So it's getting to be where it's more regularly understood. But there are lots of partners out there that see this as a growth, growth for them, your vendors, your, who provide these services.
So listen, there's work, it's now worse than putting an app up in a free to play store, but it's not impossible. There's a process for doing it and it's frustrating to me because it takes longer than I would prefer. So it's a deterrent to be honest, from some of the players who might come in.
And what's hard is you can't take your existing social casino app and throw sweeps on top of it. Cause that's not how you were approved in the first place. So we know of at least of one relatively prominent social casino that just disappeared one day because they had put sweeps into their social casino app, which might be a good consumer might be a good consumer experience, but it's not what the app store has had in mind.
So you want to make sure that you are legally buttoned up, that you have the legal opinion that makes sense, that you're following the rules and you have all of the vendors and partners that you religiously or sorry, rigorously adhere to. So that's more work, but I think it's all doable when you look at how fun and exciting this space is.
You know, when I started this company, you really look, as you know, Nico in the, in the traditional video game business, which had a great run, it's a 200 billion a year business, but it's challenged at the moment in the, in the mobile side, in the AAA side, you know, the it's flat to arguably down. And so when you look at growth factors, you start to look at gaming adjacent ones like this, even web threes coming back.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm absolutely right. Like I would absolutely not start a, a startup going after like a straight studio type business or wouldn't start something in social casino. You know, it's just too saturated and, and not. The growth factors aren't there. And so this is why I'm so excited to have you on, on the shows, because like my mind was blown almost.
It's like, well, these don't come around very often. These opportunities where there's like a literally a 6 billion to 12 billion growth opportunity over the next 12 to 24 months, that's, that's nuts to me. Right? Like, so this is a huge opportunity. So very exciting.
Sean: And that was a question when you asked earlier about being too early, which I have been too early multiple times and that's fun.
This was the question this time. Are we too early or too late? It's a, it's a crowded and very competitive sector, but on the other hand, it's also a high growth sector and that's what makes it fun. So I feel better about timing for this, but it's certainly getting more and more competitive on a weekly best.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, well, I'm sure you're not helping your cause here by coming on this podcast.
Sean: I'm very open about it. We, you know, we, this is a legal offering that we think is super exciting for consumers and we're not at the casino side of the business. So that's sometimes somebody else's game, not ours.
And we just think there are better ways to monetize, social games than necessarily founding us, founding you as hard as possible with ads.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. No, and we'll get to suit in a second about what you guys are doing differently, but I still have one. So one thing you mentioned actually, which was really interesting to me is Payments and payments like we are currently implementing Stripe for our payments and we're doing nothing that's even close to regulated stuff and they're very frustrating because like they will not let you use their payments if, and they won't tell you why they'll, they'll be like, you're not in compliance with something, but you have to kind of like guess your way to what it is.
That's been frustrating. We're fine now, but like it was just annoying and frustrating and I cannot imagine what it must be like on. Your side of the thing. So you mentioned payments, and I actually want to dig into that because it sounds like not all payment providers are cool with this category, or if they are, they'll make you jump through a lot more hoops.
So tell me a little bit about how you're doing payments like who you're using for it. And if you ever get approved on mobile. If the app store is ever, let’s start to allow this, like, is that going to either, is that going to make things a lot easier and you're looking forward to it despite having to give away 30 percent or is that going to mean a massive overhaul of your entire payments infrastructure?
Because, of course, alternative payments on app stores is despite some recent changes, thanks to Epic. It's not really that a thing yet.
Sean: So first I'd say that Stripe, although a phenomenal company, , is not historically a fan of anything in this category, so we didn't even bother. What you do in this category is you go to the payment aggregators who have a commitment to gaming.
So our case pay safe is our aggregator partner. They've been amazing. and they have done this for multiple companies. So they understand the drill. As long as you're following your legal opinion and you're legit and doing everything by the book, they are there and have a dedicated team helping gaming, meaning RealMoneyGaming, SleepsGaming, Pay Near Me is also good.
Nuvei. So you've got, those are probably the three that I would bring out that have dedicated gaming teams. That are focused because a lot of it's about the relationships. A lot of it is about following the rules, obviously, but you want to make sure that one day you don't wake up and your bank account's been terminated.
So in this case, you always have to have multiple payment provider partners, multiple bank accounts, because you do see what, especially when you're smaller. You do see some erratic behavior sometimes on that front and without payments, a sweepstakes site doesn't work. You need to be able to accept payments and pay out redemptions.
So payments are a crucial part of this business. And we spend a lot of time. I was on a call with one of our partners right before this, then on, so that's credit debit, that type of thing, Apple pay. Then we use a smaller company called AeroPay based out of Chicago for guaranteed ACH, allows you to take money in because, you This isn't just about putting money in.
This is also getting money out. So both are important and so the guaranteed ACH space, is a growing area or any player in this space. And hopefully over time, Cash App and Venmo, which do not currently participate in this space and PayPal, are not yet players in this category. We would like to bring them along as we see growth in the category.
And we know that a bunch of our consumers use those apps. But these things take time. It is as like any new and growing sector, as it gets to scale, as it gets normalized, as people feel comfortable with it, you see, you then have more entrants, including in the payment partnership side. So I totally understand.
I have to fill out. I mean, I'm looking at here. I've got one, two for one providers. I've got 32 different documents I have to fill out. That is everything from our KYC and AML to. What is our, org chart to what you just. It's, it's almost endless. But on the other hand, they're incredibly important and we believe that we should be, as buttoned up as possible, in order to make sure that our payment providers who are deeply partnered with us and everybody else in the category are satisfied because they're exposed just like we are.
If there's some wild west stuff going on, as you see, for example, in crypto and other categories.
Niko: Yeah, man. Fair play to VGW for figuring all this out as a, as a front runner. Cause I mean, it cannot have been easy to navigate this morass of like legal and banking and payments and stores and what have you.
No, it's huge amount of respect to them.
Sean: I, you know, they, they, they've grown the category. They may, maybe there's a lot more entrance now, but there's still the leader in the category and a really top flight team.
Niko: Yeah. So fair play to them, I guess I'd never heard of them before and it's, it's often the case.
Sean: It is surprising how no one's heard of anybody in this category. Yeah. There's a, there's a consulting firm called Eilers and Krejcik who are mostly real money gaming, but they have become the leader in analyzing the sweep space and so they have helped popularize this as well.
Niko: Yeah. And I, I actually know I was in very well.
Adam is in large part to credit or at least partial credit for cluing, me into the, the classic style slots opportunity. That was We launched Vivas Las Vegas that made our, our company. So yeah, so, so good guys. And they've been covering the space, the social casino space. There were pioneers covering that too.
Sean: Now that I guess they've been on fire the last 10 years, and they were. They made the move beyond just real money gaming. That originally covered physical slots. Yep. And they expanded and did it quite a lot. Respect to them. We weren't close to them on a bunch of banks.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah. Todd Eiler was the real money guy.
And then Adam came in and did the social thing. And now I think they've just like blown up as a firm. And are doing phenomenal work. So anybody who's interested in the space, by the way, social casino, real money, gaming, social sweeps. Now, I listen, cry chick. They're your guys. absolutely. One of the things I, I didn't have a plan questions, but it came up, came to me as, as we were talking here is IP.
So IP is incredibly important, now in particular, and that's part of the reason why side play is doing so well in social casino they have the brands, right? They have cricket slots. They have all the different slots, brands, IP slots, IP. That players know and love from the casinos, and that's a big part of the draw.
And yes, of course, it was possible like Playtica with Slotomania and us, you know, with Viva Las Vegas to do kind of air quotes, generic IP that was obviously based on real life stuff, but copyright reasons. You can't go and just copy, you know, the slots machines out there it's hard. It would be very hard these days, I think, to start a social casino game with a non.
IP based product. But IP is very important and with poker Zynga was early with social poker and was able to grow obviously very effectively, but now most of the poker products that are dominating, certainly in the app stores are based on world series of poker or some of the brands and the, again, the IP that is very powerful and that is known for poker, known for slots, strikes me that this is a different category.
There's there probably isn't IP. Or if there is, it's of a very different kind. So talk to me a little bit about this aspect of it. Like right now, it seems like it's a kind of a free for all, like let's yes, regulated, right? So you got to jump through a bunch more hoops, but it's a free for all. It's kind of like a land grab type moment here.
And I, it sounds like you can get away with not having anything IP based or not having partnerships with brands or whatever. Is that something you see happening in this category? Is that something that you are thinking about?
Sean: Absolutely. It's a good question. You and I saw the beginning of social casino.
This is following the same path. So Social Casino in the beginning was really innovative players like yourself and Playtika and others. Had no IP because the existing branded IP in those cases, meaning slots holders or poker brands, would not come into the category 'cause it either wasn't large enough or they didn't see it as respectable enough or somehow just didn't fit with their view of the world.
That's right. Then you saw Czu by Play Tika. You saw MGM Partner Play Studios and all of a sudden it all became legit and splayed others both acquired and then eventually brought over their real world slots. So what you see right now in this category is in, uh, sports, you have a company like Sliff, they get the same data feeds that any sports book does.
So, but there's not a lot of IP there. You see in slots that many of the companies have the same set of suppliers that you find in regulated. So you have Pragmatic, for example, which is one of the bigger slot suppliers. There's just a whole set of aggregators that supply online slots all over the world, both in regulated environments, as well as crypto casinos, which is big outside the world and now in sweeps.
And so then we'll see. And so you went through this and then what happens is as sweeps gets more legitimized, the size, the, the influence of it, the brands will start to come in probably next year, both. On the IP side and either is projecting at least one good size acquisition. And so I have a bunch of meetings, especially with the European, uh, gaming providers of different types, both vendors like slot providers, as well as casinos.
And they're looking at how to enter the U S and this may be one way for them to do it. So this will follow the traditional path as the, as the category gets larger, you'll start to see IP come into it. Then the, it'll become harder to compete without IP as it does, unless you're super innovative, which could work.
But over time, people are going to want the same types of brands that they appreciate in the real world, in the online games they're playing. So I don't see this as being anything different than social casino. If you're running a slots business. Just 10 years earlier.
Niko: Interesting. Um, what's the breakdown at the moment in terms of the, the kind of sub categories within the social sweep? Sounds like casino still is probably the largest driver doing something with arcade. What do you, can you give me a kind of a rough, I think,
Sean: I think these, I think these are artificial barriers, but the Zoot is you have social sports book.
So you're taking a sports book, but using sweepstakes regulations to run it. Bliff is one of the leaders there. There's some other ones like Thrills with two Z's there's underdog and price picks are a little bit different, but so you've got sports. Then you have the biggest casino by far, which are the biggest category, which is casino and that's Chumba and anything from Pulse and the fortune coin guys and the crown coins people.
And those types of things you do have coming. I've seen, but not launched yet. Bingo. I've seen a couple other versions coming, but bingo. I think we're about to see. And then you have what is known in the industry parlance as instant games. And instant games are similar to what I launched on Messenger at Facebook a few years ago, which are simple HTML5 games that have, you know, 30, 45 second gameplay time and are pretty entertaining. And in this case, your core, your analog would be the hyper casual business in mobile. These are hyper casual games or Easton games. And what they are, are arcade like games that still have a sweepstakes outcome, but feed a different type of consumer.
That there's a bunch of consumers who don't like slots, particularly younger men who, who would prefer arcade like games versus slots. And so that's where we at Zooter are focused. And that's really what I would, how I would differentiate the categories. For example, the top category, the top, Historic game in the space is called Aviator.
Now, as a game designer, this looks really simple. It is literally a plane that goes up to the right. It could be a rocket ship. It could be anything. And you enter a sweepstakes entry. It could be a dollar. It could be 10. As it goes up to the right, it multiplies. You have a multiplier, 3, or whatever, whatever you want to call it.
If you can cash out whenever you want. And you keep those proceeds. If it crashes, you lose it. So it is almost like a slot machining in some ways that you can, um, cash out halfway through for a reduced earn, but it's just different. And so those are the types of games or minds like we have, which is there's 25 minds, five of them are bad, 20 are good.
You click on the, you click on the ones on the board as the multiplier goes up until you hit the bad one. Uh, or Flint go is a very popular game. It's a version of the Chinko or pinball, but without the flippers. You drop a ball down through many pegs, and if it ends in a positive hole, then you win, you, you win your switch decks, and if it doesn't, then you lose.
So the question that you should be asking and what people ask is why would people do that?
Niko: I don't ask that question because I worked in social casino. I worked in casino. I've worked in real money. I don't ask that question anymore. I know, I know like your traditional game developers are kind of snobbish and like, you know, snooty about these, these types of games, these categories, but I don't ask that question.
But yes, let's ask the question on behalf of our listeners.
Sean: The answer. Most of our listeners, your listeners are probably video game folks, and you're used to everything being skill based, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's awesome, but the nature here is that there are others who like the idea of a simpler game play experience, and it's about the entertainment.
That's what people keep forgetting here. And we also used to have this debate in social casino. Like why would anybody do social casino? If you can't win anything, if I have to keep, if I can keep hearing that.
Niko: How many times?
Sean: And so the answer is, it's entertainment. And just like when I go to the baseball game or I go to the movie, I don't expect to win money.
I shouldn't expect to win money. What we see here is that you can play for free, no different than a free to play casino. And then if you wish to, and you have the sweepstakes entries, you can have a little more of an experience there because there's a chance that you will, you will win the contest. It's a chance.
It's not as field based, but it's a chance. And for some people that works for them. There's a bunch of people will say, look at that and say, that's not my bag. And you know what? That's okay too. This is not about satisfying everybody all the time. It's about finding gamers who find entertaining, simple gameplay experiences that in certain cases, they want to enter a contest and see if they win.
Niko: Absolutely. I mean, I do it whenever the Powerball goes above 1B. That's my threshold. I'll buy a lottery ticket. So there you go.
Sean: Hey, by the way, I do the same. I do the same thing, even though I know that in the real money gaming space, it is the single worst Entry you can do it as a 40, it has a 48 percent return to player where a normal slot has a 92 or 95 percent return to player.
I want a billion dollars.
Niko: Yeah, I know. It's, you're doing your EV calculations, but you're doing them all wrong, of course, because your EV is actually way lower, but it's like, well, if I get it, like then the EV is amazing. Right. But that's not how it works in real life. Okay.
All right. Well, let's talk a little bit more about Zoot now then, sure. So I, I really appreciate kind of laying out the, the landscape. Very interesting. It seems like it's playing out the social casino playbook, but a decade later, I'm very excited. Like social casino, obviously is an absolutely monster category now.
And no doubt this will be as well. It sounds like it's, it's actually on a faster trajectory of growth than social casino was back in the day. So Zoot, what are you doing and what's different about your approach? It sounds like this arcade thing is kind of novel. And there aren't many other games doing this.
Why do you think it's going to work and what are you doing differently to stand out in this, what sounds like very fast growing, but still already reasonably crowded market with 50 to a hundred players that you're saying that.
Sean: So we did the whiteboard. We love gaming. My, my co-founder and I, John Cahill, who's the CTO and my co-founder across multiple companies.
We just did the whiteboard and said, what do we know? We know games. Okay, great. Check. Let's see what's growing and doesn't seem insanely competitive. We looked at skill base. We looked at sweeps based. We looked back at web three, but we'd already been burned in that, and we tried to see what else is there and sweeps.
We knew a bit cause we had sold like the land slots to BGW many years ago. Not for a great outcome, by the way, like a BGW deserves all the credit on that one. And so we said, okay. Okay. Now, what do we like to do personally? We're gamers. We grew up on games. We play games. John used to run Yahoo! Games platform.
I was early at various game companies. We like games. And I'm not against slots. It's a wonderful business. Just so we're clear. Slots and casino, I was deeply involved in it at Facebook with all of our partners like yourself. It's a great category. It's just not my category. And so at our age, we're like, okay, what do we want to do that we think would be super fun that could grow to be significant and where we could differentiate.
Nothing's defensible forever. But how do you be different? And I just posted this. If you remember the old Steve Jobs ad, be different, act different, be different to Apple. That's what I kind of live, what I deliver to the team on a regular basis is we are trying to be an arcade game site that just has a different revenue model, that's all it is.
We can talk about the other genres. Those just aren't our genres. So how do, how do we be different? First, we build it all ourselves, which is controversial. We built the platform ourself because John has built many platforms and we built the games ourselves. We don't use anybody else's games. We have an instant games.
Our team is based in Bucharest, Romania, where we've worked before. And we build currently build everything ourselves. Lots of other people license in platforms, use white labels, same slots. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a faster, faster move to market. It's not how we think we're going to differentiate in the long run.
Second is we also do, we do classic games and then we do mean games. So mean games, which we will remember back, and sorry, if I already repeated, this is back in the old shockwave days, the Zidane headbutt game. Zidane was the captain of the French soccer team. He headbutted a guy during the world cup. I think it was our heroes got thrown out, but it was, they rushed the game out the door.
It was a monster. It was simple. There was nothing that exciting about it, but it was fun. And we want to give back. It's a fun, these games, I tell my team all the time, these games should make you laugh or sad. They should make you want to screenshot it at the end and send it to friends. That's what I want.
I want fun back in the experience. The sweepstakes part, frankly, is ancillary. It matters. I'm not saying that, but I want people to think about what are they doing at night. Let me go see what's on at Zoot. It's about entertainment. And so I'll give you a, no one should ever build a, a platform for your kids, but I did.
So I have a 21 year old, a 23 year old and a 25 year old boy, all three boys. And I looked at how they go through their gaming life and their game or two of the three of them in particular are gamers. And this is aimed at them that when they aren't doing sports book, which the two of the three of them do, what else are they going to do?
And the answer is my oldest son came home the other night in New York and he and his buddies came home from the bars. They airplayed Zoot to the TV and just laughed and they laughed and entered in and out of sweepstakes. I should have videoed it, but, so that's what we want. And so do I think it's differentiated?
Yes. I think we're moving fast. I think it plays to our strengths, which are our video game company. We are a video game people by design. We are bringing a different vibe to this, to our situation. You know, our games in two weeks ago is Kamala versus Trump. It's a fighting game. Now it looks a bit like street fighter, although it's different enough, but now it's still using block based outcomes that has quickly become one of our most popular yet, you know, it's basketball season.
So we have basketball minds that are coming out. It's Halloween coming out, you know, we crank out a game a week. Sometimes they're just skins, sometimes they're original IP, uh, original gameplay, but it's about cranking out great IP, having something new and different every few weeks. And then adding what you know, Nico and others in this space to bring all the social features from a mature social platform, like a supercell.
So chat. And quests. We just launched daily and weekly quests this week. Leveling up features by social mobile standards, either nothing new or interesting by anything in sweepstakes. It's radical, and so that's what we want to bring. We want to bring a social and social mobile style play to this super exciting category with unbelievably simple games, but a great meta as many of your, customer, many of your listeners know the meta around it matters, not just the game, because the games are simple.
So how do you keep coming back? Because the meta is there because the scoreboards, we don't have groups yet, but you'll see that coming up with plans or whatever you want to call them. So how do you bring that sensibility? As well as just a sensibility of fun. That's really what we do. And we think it's differentiated.
We have some investors, by the way, looked at and said, yeah, it's too radical. I'd rather do slots. I'm like, I get it. It's just not my business. So there's nothing wrong with that. We could be right. We could be wrong. Early numbers look good, but, but we're early. And so that's really how we differentiate, which is our background, our team, our speed, we build everything ourselves.
And we think we've got a relatively differentiated approach.
Niko: Yeah, yeah. So kind of like an addicting games or congregate for yep. Yeah. Okay.
Sean: And you are old enough to remember that. I'm not sure everybody is, but that's, that's really what, where my inspiration comes from is that style with a different revenue model.
Niko: Yeah, absolutely. That makes total sense. I, we had a, gosh, I forget it was a pixels dot X, Y, Z. They, they have a very similar, that was a Web3 company. And so they had a very similar, like, we're just making simple mean games. Like we're cranking them out. They had a crypto angle, Web3 angle to them.
But they seem to be doing really, really well, contrary to most Web3 players who are like trying to build that one big giant product. I don't know if you saw Azure Games just announced ano yet. Another huge fundraise. Mark ERO seems to be a, a genius at fundraising. They still haven't shipped anything , which is mind blowing.
Sean: And here I've had this together before, I do worry about trying to, trying to build AAA games on, on web three, but I've always believed the simpler games would be the better play and then you build up over time, but Mark and the team there are very good, so I was going to back a team in crypto, I'd back them.
But, I'm still waiting for that hit. Maybe off the grid is that straight hit that we were waiting for. But in our case, that is our, that is our inspiration. Miko is exactly what you talked about. I think John used to be involved in running Yahoo games or going back to where the Pogo days, that type of thing.
It sounds so funny, but that's, these things come around again over time, by the way, I believe games in this category will go up in fidelity. Many of the games that our competitors have don't have sound, which is in vain debate. I mean, a game's supposed to have sound, but you know, so better for, we've tried a couple of unity games that are a little 3d a phase.
So we're going to keep experimenting with new gameplay genres. , playing with the mean light games, be very current with games, but that's how we think we differentiate over time.
Niko: Okay. And most of the gameplay I'm presuming is happening over web on the website. Is mobile web a thing? Are you thinking about like the form factor there?
Or maybe I'm just, we do. We do.
Sean: So, so we're, we're 75 percent mobile web, 25 percent desktop. Okay. Interesting. A little more Android than we expected, which was interesting. , and we're us only by the way, and parts of Canada where sweepstakes law is, uh, enabled, um, and so it's mobile web only we'll do a progressive web app probably by the end of this year.
And I'm not against doing apps in stores. One, it takes a bigger team to do a really great, uh, Android app and a really great iOS app, and just the rules are a little bit uncertain in there. Right. So hopefully 2025 will be, uh, you know, an expansion of what we do. But for right now, it's all mobile. So we do, we have to take into account very much.
So the mobile form factor, and you may not remember mobile web, but it is, it has some challenges. So there's certain benefits to apps, mobile web, different screen sizes, different processor, but on the other hand, you see a little bit of growth. You and I talking broader beyond sweeps of web apps coming back because you're not subject to the whims of the app store owners.
There were challenges with it, but you look at web stores, for example, which most mobile apps have now, which is not the full game, but at least in a different way to purchase, there's benefits to the open web, there are trade offs, but there are certainly benefits that we control our destiny, can figure out how to bring people to the game and the end of the site, and then figure out how to monetize and re engage them, but you do lose some of the channels that the app stores and the apps themselves have done an amazing job of.
Niko: Yeah, yeah, and yeah, I mean, lack of storefront right discoverability, not that there's great discoverability in the app store these days, but, but, but, you know, you have a shot at least if you have something that's interesting and innovative and, you know, getting featured is still a thing, like it still does something for you, you know, maybe not as powerful as it used to be.
But, but nonetheless, , still a needle mover, so to speak. , okay. We are coming up to time, but I want to have a couple more questions for you. , and, and the first one is, , what does innovation look like? And it sounds like there's a lot of stuff happening in the space. You know, people trying out different things.
You can move relatively quickly, despite the fact that there's regulation, you can be reasonably innovative and do things that like haven't been tried before, and some of it's going to work and some of it's not, so what do you Think it's going to happen over the next five years. We've mentioned a couple of times that you see this similar to the social casino playbook, where there's like a lot of, you know, small scrappy players, startups, like doing things without IP non legacy players, right?
Like truly startups. That's what it sounds like. This is as well. But then over time you get the more mature companies coming in, either making acquisitions and bringing their IP or brands to bear or their player basis, customer basis. What do you think the next five years, maybe that's too long, three years looks like in social sweeps.
Sean: So I think one. And explosion and entrance, we see them kind of hanging out at a ferocious rate, both white labels, platforms, all sorts of things. So that'll be the first thing everybody sees. Second is hopefully we'll see innovation in games. Games, both whether they're slots, table, or in our case, instant games, different gameplay mechanics that still follow rigorously the sweepstakes rules.
But give you a little bit of, so for example, if we had a golf game, we could have a swing meter in it that if you hit the swing correctly, your bonus would change, it wouldn't change the outcome just sort of clear, but it would change, you know, elements of the out of the bonus that you can do. , so I think we'll see, we think our boxing, our fighting game is one of the more innovative ones we've seen.
We try and have a, as do others, we try and have a more innovative game loop or game play mechanic about every month or two. And then we have a bunch of skins and other types of variants we do based on seasonal. So I think we'll see more variants in games, which is awesome. And three, I think we'll see the normalization of this entire category.
This is following either the social casino one or the one I would look at is daily fantasy. So daily fantasy started roughly 15 years ago, give or take, and over time it became semi regulated in 20 states, not in 30. And now DraftKings and FanDuel are obviously the largest players in real money gaming as well.
I think over time, we're going to see widespread adoption on app stores. I think we're going to see this become just a, we'll see IP come into the space as it gets larger. And we'll see some of the existing players, whether it's social casino or real money. Come into the category and I have two or three of those conversations a week, including this week of people trying to say, what can I do in this category?
So I think it will just become like, just like daily fantasy became part of the landscape. The sweeps fan will become part of the landscape and it'll just be normalized and regularized. Well, we will see is how it works globally right now. Everybody is a geo block to the 45 states in the U S and the four provinces in Canada.
The question is, and the question is, when you look at sweepstakes rules in Brazil or in Japan or Australia, what can you do there? But for right now, it's a really vibrant market here in the U. S. And so I think you'll see more of everything and most, most importantly, more innovation on gameplay. And what we're doing is bringing all the social features of social or mobile into this category in a way no one else has done.
Niko: Nice. Okay. Very exciting times. Like I said in the intro, it's not often in gaming and certainly in recent years, it's been super rare, like Web3 was the one kind of exception and TBD, whether it's going to play out or not, where there's this, there's this truly new and novel I, gosh, that's, that's actually a little unfair to say.
Cause it's actually, this isn't truly new and novel. This is actually tried and true and it's just being applied in a different way. And it's just really fascinating to see how, what was once old is new again, or whatever that expression is. You know what I'm saying? Right.
Sean: Yeah. I mean, I agree. It's, we're borrowing from the past and applying some new models to it.
And before I started this company, I did, I interviewed. All my friends in the industry, I mean, all the senior friends, both in the real money gaming side, because I originally started the real money gaming part of Facebook many years ago. So I know the business well, and I interviewed them and I interviewed a bunch of people in the social casino space and just said, Hey, what do you think of this category?
Most people had no idea what it was. So not all, not all, some are like, ah, that's kind of a weird little thing on the side. And a couple, a couple of folks really knew it well, but that's what I liked about it is I thought the timing this time would be good and I think it is. And so, but I agree. It's, it's a super exciting area.
I think there are other areas in the gaming adjacent space, but I think game developers and game executives will always be creative and look for that next shoots of growth. Sometimes it works out, which it looks like it is in this category. And sometimes in web three, we're a little bit too early or VR at a certain point or metaverse 10 years ago, or, but what I love about gaming is how creative, executives and their teams and developers, the ideas are pushing the envelope on what we can do.
And this is just one of those areas. I'm sure there'll be many now.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. There's, there's always like, like kind of dry patches for a while and then suddenly you see these shoots kind of growing up and this seems like this is one of those times. Okay. Well, that's a perfect place to go to our final question, which is I ask all of our guests, which is what three games are you currently playing or are most excited about?
And you can't pick your own. So I think, you know,
Sean: my role, I think, I think, you know, my role, we talked about the last time, so I, I'm not a great gamer in that I treat it like a job. So I play one hour a day of games, not, not less, not more. And I delete a game if I play it more than 10 hours. So this is not going to make me any fans in the gaming sector because I won't play enough games if I don't do it.
And I love to see what gaming loops are, monetization loops are. I enjoy games, but I just find I, I'm easily addicted to awesome games. So I need to stop. So I play mostly mobile games, right? I, I did start playing the new age of empires, , the mobile one that shipped this week.
Niko: Oh, is it good? So I was a huge fan of the original,
Sean: a huge fan of the original. I'm not sure you can bring art. I was a big RTS guy. I'm not sure you can bring it to mobile. This is a Chinese developer with the license. Early signs are good. It has to look and steal. At the moment, there aren't a lot of choices that involve skills. So it's pretty early. I'm probably a few hours in, , I'm a local company.
I live in Barcelona part of the year from Sansoft is called Pocket Necromancer. And it just shipped in the last couple of weeks. It is like a Vampires. io or Survivors. io, but done in a hybrid casual way with really high production level standards. So it came out of the womb fully baked with all of the season pass and leveling up and all that.
But with that simple mechanic, I'm really enjoying that one. And then there's a weird one that's an indie, not weird, it's an indie. My friends here in the wine business, so I'm kind of into the wine business, even though I'm not very good at it. So this is called a hundred days and it's about running a winery.
It's not a high fidelity game, just so we're clear. It's kind of more of almost like a factorio. It's not, you know, I don't think it's always that fun, but it does teach you a lot about what it takes to run the basics of a wine business. And I love it'd be games. And so I love these guys came out with us.
Niko: All right. Game dev tycoon for wine, I guess.
Sean: Yeah, pretty much, pretty much sad. So like I said, I still love to play. I just, I'm a little not, coordinated enough for console games anymore, even though I keep trying. And then I'll segregate and then the new web three game off the grid, that's pseudo web three.
I'm going to at least try that.
Niko: Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, I think it's going to be the highest, most funded game, highest funding for any game in web three, by the time it ships, if it ever ships.
Sean: Well, well, well, Shrapnel had that title for a long time. So yes.
Niko: Well, that, that's true. That's true.
Sean: When's that shipping?
Niko: Yeah, let's, let's see. Let's see. I still have a soft spot for web3 and I still kind of, I'm still long. One. Long on crypto, long on web3, but boy, the industry hasn't done any favors for itself. I have to say.
Sean: No, no, I'm still with you on both points.
Niko: Yeah. All right. Well, cool. That's all the time we have for us.
So Sean, thank you so much for coming on the pod. This was absolutely fascinating. I always enjoyed talking with you anyway, regardless, but this was a real great opportunity to learn something new, learn about a category that I had no idea even existed was a thing. And is one of the reasons why I love gaming so much is because there's always something cooking, even if.
Like I said, there's a dry patch for a while. There's always something that's going to be like, wow, like, why didn't I think of that kind of thing? Right. And this feels like one of those moments. So thank you, Sean.
Sean: Thank you for having me on the show. Always great. Always great to connect with you again.
Niko: And of course, as always a big thank you to all of our listeners. We'll be back next week with more interviews, more insights, and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of gaming. So until next time, friends, feel free to send questions, guests, recommendations, and comments. My email is [email protected].
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