Casino dashboard: November 2024

No new games made it into our main chart this month and, bar a little shuffling mid-table, most titles held their own. After four years of presenting these charts, this seems typical at this time of year, especially as all heads are reversed towards the spooktacular.

So onto the main act – our Halloween chart, based on the performance of scarily themed titles across 40,000 pages of 3,500 operators, showcasing only the highest performing title per studio.

Halloween top 20 games (2024)

At the top Big Bass Halloween 2 by Pragmatic Play took the full moonlight, echoing the success of last year’s BB Halloween 1 – I think we’re ok to start abbreviating this franchise. Blood Suckers by NetEnt retained its second spot, while Baron: Lord of Saturday (Play’n GO) completed the podium. Four years on and sequels to the original Immortal Romance, Esqueleto Explosivo and Blood & Shadow games still haunt us.

It’s good to see a few newcomers entering the fright-fray, such as Bgaming, Spinomenal, Booming Games and Endorphina. The fresh studio faces in our Halloween charts tend to mirror those that are also making progress in their share of overall game distribution – look out for our next quarterly casino performance report for more evidence of this.

As per last year, half of our main Halloween chart titles were also new releases.

Best new Halloween releases (2024)

The new batch splits evenly into a dark or lighthearted treatment of the horror motif.

A softer approach was taken by the likes of Red Rake Gaming, Playtech and SpinPlay Games. Day Of The Dead skulls tend to dance in this subcategory too.

Meanwhile, Relax Gaming and Bgaming both joined the dark masters Nolimit City and Hacksaw Gaming in their macabre approach. Freaky winning sequences featured kids toys coming alive in Forgotten (Bgaming), or clowns emerging from the shadows in Dreadworks (Print Studios, via Relax), reminiscent of their Darkness title last year.

We’re still a way off the jump scares found in video gaming, however, so here’s a thought: how about incorporating yet more of the suspense, music and shock elements, that would make the prospect of winning an emotional rollercoaster? If you promote the game via this year’s top Xmas gift, a Metaquest VR headset, Vlad will be your uncle. Health warnings to be added to the intro credits, of course, to keep any regulatory wolves from the door.

We thought it worth probing the mass of data to see whether fun and frolics perform better, or worse than fear and foreboding. We categorised the top 25% of all Halloween titles (280 of the 1,100 total) into, quite simply: Fun/Serious or a bit of both. The overlappers on our new Chill-Chilling scale are those that may look serious but incorporate a bit of farce, such as a smiling pumpkin.

Note that very few mummy games creep into our Halloween category, i.e. those where the core theme is not Egyptian. Otherwise, Baba Yaga, the Day Of The Dead mariachi, ghosts, vampires, Frankenstein, zombies, devils, pumpkins and Halloween ‘editions’ all make the cut.

And the results are in…

The Halloween titles are split quite evenly into the two subthemes. But there’s no clear winner on performance – as measured by the average number of sites where a game can be found.

Such a score draw result may sound boring, but it does suggest that fun and serious treatments both work well. That said, the more serious games are less likely to fall foul of ‘appealing to minors’ – see last year’s Christmas charts for more on this.

Hats off to Popok Gaming for launching ‘Halloween Crash’ before the rest. Whether this is trademarkable or not is a different question and, given the recent legal battles over game IP, is a topic to be covered in next month’s charts.

Top 20 games by distribution

Halloween game production

Although Wazdan reskinned more than a dozen games as Halloween editions, Spinomenal led the pack again in terms of new horror titles, cranking out 10 this year, five launching in just the last few weeks. Other big producers of the genre include Onlyplay and Habanero (both with contenders just outside the top 20), WorldMatch, Bgaming and Light & Wonder. Nolimit City of course continue to celebrate Halloween the whole year round.

Biggest aggregator dealmakers

Game distribution and sourcing

A handful of studios have been expanding their reach via aggregators in recent months including Bgaming, 1Spin4Win and TaDa Gaming.

Aggregator Everymatrix retained the top spot as the busiest aggregator in the last six months but Hub88 are hot on their heels.

Stay tuned for our upcoming Q3 review, packed with data on studio performance, game metrics, and much more.

Biggest studio dealmakers

* Please note these are live charts which update every month so please ensure the month of October 2024 is selected in the drop-downs to match the analysis

**The interactive games chart at the top excludes live games and table games. Game rankings are determined by the number of game appearances on the casino homepages of more than 3,500 casino sites. To access many other charts including game rankings, live and table games, positions on subpages or to filter game performance by game theme, game feature, market or operator, please get in touch with our partner, egamingmonitor.com. Egamingmonitor covers 70,000 games, 1,700 suppliers and 3,500+ operators.

Original article: https://igamingbusiness.com/casino-games/casino-dashboard-november-2024/