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Staying true to his serial entrepreneur label, Brock Pierce is leaving a trail of budding companies everywhere he goes. Knee-deep in the Bitcoin and social gaming space, he supports companies such as GoCoin, ExpressCoin, Xfire and Five Delta.
One of those promising companies is Playsino, a Santa Monica-based social casino company out to conquer the $37 billion casino industry. Pierce co-founded Playsino to be a provider of casino games like Bingo World and Playsino Poker and also as a platform to host social games for commercial casinos. Pierce formerly served as CEO and now is chairman.
“Brock tends to be way ahead of the curve; he did that in the social casino, he’s doing the same thing in the Bitcoin space right now,” current CEO Alex Kelly said. “He’s very, very good at identifying trends, getting people to see his vision and move forward.”
Kelly is doing just that, moving forward and hunkering down for a huge year of growth at Playsino. Previously while at the world’s largest producer of gaming machines and content IGT, Kelly initiated a $500 million acquisition of casino game developer DoubleDown Interactive. He joined Playsino in 2013 - and now is preparing to make tracks by bringing in commercial casino partners in 2014.
“We are growing very aggressively,” Kelly said. “We are very focused on the casino partner business, so we expect to have 75 to 100 casino partners by the end of 2014.”
These casino partners are casinos that are looking for an “in” to the social casino world, but “don’t have the content or platform or scope” to do so, Kelly said. Only about 10 commercial casinos currently have the scale to break into the social casino space themselves: “We are coming in and partnering with the rest of them and helping them get their brands on top of our content.”
Playsino is announcing its first casino partner within the next few weeks, meanwhile consistently working to globally distribute its own gaming products. Their Bingo World game is now completely cross-platform (Facebook, Nook, Kindle and more included) and just passed the 1 million user mark last month. Across all its games, Playsino has reeled in over 5 million users.
These numbers show good traction against competing games like Bingo Bash. But Playsino has a whole different pool of competitors to face as well, Kelly said: “You have products that compete and you have companies that compete. Companies like Caeser’s, Double Down, Big Fish Games are competing with our overall business.”
The 17-person Playsino team, including five who are based in Kiev, Ukraine, has the development and the industry experience under their belts prepared to face these competitors.
“We’ve got a lean and mean development team that spends an enormous amount of time and resources to build a platform that allows us to deliver our content very efficiently,” Kelly said. “And we think that by partnering with casinos that have large databases of users already, we are positioned to grow really rapidly.”
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