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Facebook Casino: not Gambling

Posted on May 19th, 2011

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With all the actions taken by the federal government on terminating online gambling services the past month, one online casino managed to squeak past the Feds’ operation. DoubleDown Casino games from DoubleDown Interactive LLC has continued to flourish on its virtual casino operations on Facebook. What warranted them from the government’s shutdown of Internet gambling sites? “Virtual currency.” When the Seattle-based gaming company started in December 2009, its founders Greg Enell and Cooper DuBois had one initial thing in mind; “to build the most realistic virtual casino possible”. But the two were also aware of the legal consequences they might incur if they’d set out for their goal. They knew operating an online casino would be difficult with the UIGEA in place.

Then they bumped into the free poker games on Facebook. Enell and DuBois got the idea of having virtual currencies work around the prohobitions againsttheir envisioned business while still leaving ample opportunity for making a profit. Today, the DoubleDown Casino is one of the best-known online casinos around. It has already reached the 1.2 million mark in monthly users count. About 1.1 million people have also “liked” their Facebook page. “That’s important, because when we post news on our wall that’s 1.1 million who have access to that information,” he said. “We’ve been growing fairly quickly,” said Enell. “It has taken us 15 months to grow to more than 1.2 million active monthly players. We also have 400,000 daily players.”

Enell said games with high retention rates were the main factors behind their game’s speedy bloom. DoubleDown Interactive launched their online casino in March 2010 having a multiplayer blackjack game as their debut offering. By September, they added slots and roulette to their lineup. Video poker is the most recent addition to the casino’s array of games. They introduced their newest set of video poker games to the social gaming public exactly three days after popular online gambling casinos PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker were put offline by the Federal government.

Enell said the Poker “Black Friday” (the day of the website shutdowns) still didn’t have a major effect to their virtual casino in either the positive or negative way. “We haven’t seen any migration to our casino following Black Friday.” A possible reason for the neutral effect of the “Black Friday” is the fact that unlike those real online gambling casinos dispatched by the authorities, DoubleDown’s virtual casino doesn’t earn its players real money. Its “virtual currency model” gives the players virtual chips to play with. Players can buy their chips but they can never cash them out. “It’s illegal to operate a gambling site,” Ennel said. “That’s why we are not a real- money gaming site.”

Each player can receive a minimum of 20,000 chips daily free of charge. But they can opt to avail of some more. “If you need more, we will sell then for between $3 and $100,” Enell said. “For $3, a player will receive 15,000 chips or for $99 they’ll get a million chips.” Enell’s company is readying to introduce another game to its online casino next month; a multiplayer online poker game. Now, Enell is finding additional ways to keep his online casino business afloat. A large part of the company’s profit to date are from chips-selling. His company now has 35 employees and he said his company is lucky to be based on Seatlle which he thinks of as a hotbed for casual gaming companies. “There are a lot of skilled people in this town,” he said. “We have a lot of well-paid people working here.”

Enell narrated how their company’s every game is developed. He said 90 days is the duration to develop a fully-functional and bug-free game that would be released on Facebook. “We have millions of dollars invested in the casino at this point,” he said. “The development cost for a single-player game is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and multiplayer games are in the millions of dollars.” With the continuing success of his company, Enell feels he still has some milestones to achieve. Enell outlined their plan to eventually expand. He maintains, however, that the company would expand sustainably in order to avoid burning out.