Gambling related articles

New brand on the block takes a punt on pokies

From Publicstock
July 2015.

There is a new kid on the online casino block. Pokies.com is the branded face of Progress Play Ltd, operating out of the UK regulated island of Malta. Their offering combines the proven architectural software of Progress Play and Microgaming underpinned by the online SSL security of Thawte.com. The site looks clean, fresh, modern and engaging and Pokies.com clearly mean business.

There is a pleasing immediacy to what pokies.com are offering. Whilst they are predominantly focused on the easy to play, repeat, spin and go again logic of pokies, they are shrewd enough to provide access to the full suite of casino gaming opportunities. As everybody knows, the hard part is getting traffic to visit your domain. Once you've got that far, passing up the opportunity to achieve diverse revenues just doesn't make sense.

In this respect the pokies.com site achieves an impressive balance between selling itself as a straightforward easy to play - no download - site and one that offers a more competitive and more challenging set of options as a secondary attraction. Clearly, the ambition is to provide a site whereby long-term users can be progressed to more involved forms of play over the course of an extended relationship. The initial visit, however, sensibly, suggests a simple, accessible and uncomplicated relationship based on an extensive range of straightforward pokies and scratchies games.

The games are universally themed around cartoon style visuals with an array of familiar characters gracing such games as Pandamania, Lara Croft and Superman. All in all the offering is safe, comfortable, easy to use and ideally constructed to appeal to those who enjoy the pokies experience. Needless to say, it is compatible with Apple and Android handhelds which is entirely consistent with the ever growing number of mobile players which the site appears to be targeting.

Such a long-term strategy deserves some sort of credit at a time when there is so much negativity surrounding any mention of the word pokies. In that respect, the vociferous media campaign being staged by those who oppose gambling in all its forms is hardly helpful. It will be interesting to see to what degree the overt branding of the site in terms of such a news-sensitive, not to say loaded, term plays out over the coming months. As much as there is all that froth in the media, there is still a deep-rooted affection for pokies that runs pretty deep in the Australian psyche. It'll be interesting to see how their punt on pokies plays out there and elsewhere.

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