Q&A: KamaGames MD on going live on Facebook Games

KamaGames announced last week it had launched its flagship Pokerist title onto Facebook’s Instant Games platform.

This move means Facebook users can simply tap a button on their Facebook page or beneath their Facebook Messenger chats and get straight to the tables.

KamaGames Ireland managing director Andrey Kuznetsov said the developer was always looking for ways to expand and capitalize on new technologies and services.

“The number of Pokerist players has recently reached a huge 95 million and with Pokerist now being made easily available to the 2 billion Facebook Messenger users that number is only going to grow,” Kuznetsov added.

Following the launch Kuznetsov spoke to EGR NA about the benefits of the Facebook platform and the learnings from the launch.

EGR North America (EGR NA): What does the Facebook platform offer that others don’t?

Andrey Kuznetsov (AK): Size, scale and reach without a doubt. Facebook is the largest social platform in the world, with its own messenger service being used by around 2 Billion Facebook users and growing. Our goal is to have Pokerist, available to all of our players on all of their favourite platforms, including Facebook Instant games.

EGR NA: And are there benefits beyond sheer scale/reach?

AK: A large number of the Facebook Instant Games users are also within the messenger platform via their mobile devices. People spend significant amounts of time within the app with a large amount of contacts available at any time. The platform also offers a wide variety of viral and social interaction tools to help drive as much user-to-user experience as possible.

This is all incredibly relevant to us, as we’d like to see how these features can work in synergy with our online Social Poker, which in itself is a very social platform for our players.

EGR NA: Do you have plans to release other games on there?

AK: It’s definitely something to consider as we believe the platform has great potential, however, we can’t confirm anything at this exact moment in time.

EGR NA: What are the main player insights available to you from this platform launch?

AK: This is one of the first platforms that offers a true cross-platform experience for a stand-alone product. You can play instant games through a mobile device as well as via a desktop or a laptop. It’s going to be interesting to see how the user-base will behave in such an environment, the choices they make etc.

Another valuable data point is that at this moment, Facebook seems to prefer to feature the Instant Games section when accessing through a desktop as well as mobile.  We’re also very keen to see the results of the current fine-tuning of the monetisation approach on the platform, ranging from ads to direct purchases.

KamaGames MD Andrey Kuznetsov