European social casino game operator KamaGames has added social betting on esports and traditional sports games to its popular Pokerist app.
Pokerist players will now be able to use the virtual chips in their account for the poker game Pokerist to make wagers on real-life sporting events from the NBA to League of Legends. Dublin, Ireland-based KamaGames believes this will drive greater engagement through its entire portfolio of gaming titles, said Andrey Kuznetsov, CEO of KamaGames, in an interview with GamesBeat.
“We launched our test in our news feed in November 2018,” said Kuznetsov. “In two weeks, 1.2 million bets were made. It was a good result. We looked at other companies in social sports betting and analyzed the lessons learned.”
“In other examples, there were two big problems,” he said. “Players wanted live bets, and they wanted more layers of gamification, or various kinds of meta rewards in the games. We implemented both of these things.”
Pokerist has more than 630,000 daily uses and KamaGames’ full portfolio generates tens of millions of dollars in revenue each quarter.
The company has launched the Social Sports Betting feature with several options to wager chips through the availability of pre odds as well as live odds, along with other betting options that include accumulator bets and single bets. But it is not real-money gambling because players cannot cash out their virtual chips.
The catalog of sports and leagues available to players will now include more than a dozen sports along with major leagues such as the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Series A, Champions League, NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB.
