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Todd Haushalter, Evolution’s chief product officer, said overly advanced technology and complicated gameplay are among the reasons some of the company’s live casino games failed to catch on.
Haushalter made the comments in an insights piece Evolution published Nov. 2. The company develops live casino games for real-money online casinos and has had more live game failures than anyone else but said it also has produced more hits.
One example was Gonzo’s Treasure Hunt, which Haushalter said failed because its concept was “too technologically advanced.” He also said Evolution is “terrible” at deciding when to rework a struggling game and when to abandon it.
Gonzo’s Treasure Hunt flops on tech overreach
Launched in 2021, Gonzo’s Treasure Hunt let Evolution showcase its advanced technology and design. The game blended a live game show with online slot-style features. It used augmented reality to layer digital images, including the Gonzo character, over live video.
A virtual reality mode let players with a headset join the action. Evolution has said no other online live game show had offered VR before it.
The game centered on a wall of 70 stones hiding the treasure, but players weren’t won over. Haushalter said the team first suspected the lack of a bonus round and added one. “No one cared,” he said.
He believes the giant wall turned players off and said a game can become too technologically advanced. Simple games still work, he said, pointing to Crazy Coin Flip, built on a basic coin toss. Evolution later reworked the title as Gonzo’s Treasure Map, but the new version did not deliver the result the company hoped for.
Complex online casino games lose distracted players
Evolution thought Lightning Blackjack and Gold Bar Roulette would be easy to understand and quick to play. “Players begged to differ,” Haushalter said.
Gold Bar Roulette, launched in 2022, gave online roulette players Gold Bars that acted as multipliers. Players could save the bars for later rounds, choose where to place them and stack several on a single number. That added control also demanded closer attention.
Holding that attention has become harder, Haushalter said. Many players watch Netflix or flip between TikTok and Evolution’s games, so anything that feels too complicated can quickly lose them. But many of Evolution’s more intricate games have succeeded, he noted.
The point, he said, is that complexity must be worth the player’s attention.
Math and bad mixes erode appeal
A game’s underlying math can quietly undermine it, according to the piece. Online casino games are built around a payout rate, meaning how much money it returns to players over time. Two games can return about the same amount on average yet feel very different. One may deliver steady results, while another brings long losing streaks broken by an occasional big win.
Over time, Haushalter said, the math wears down how much players enjoy a game. Because players experience one round at a time, a game can look promising at first, and the problem shows only when players stop coming back.
A poor combination of ideas can also hurt a game. After the success of Lightning Roulette, Evolution introduced Lightning Bac Bo, which pairs the Bac Bo dice game with the visual style and multipliers of its Lightning titles. Those multipliers can increase a payout by a set amount.
Evolution expected the combination to work, but Haushalter said players did not respond as hoped.
Evolution’s fixes deliver mixed results
Evolution has had mixed success rescuing games that failed to catch on. The company reworked Deal or No Deal, a live game based on the TV show, but the changes did not revive it.
Other efforts paid off, Haushalter said, pointing to the retooling of Red Door Roulette and the transformation of Gold Bar Roulette into Gold Vault Roulette. Knowing when to step in is hard. “There’s no magic bullet. There’s no formula.”
When a game fails, the cause is often unclear. It could be the theme, the speed of play, the payout math, the screen design or how much effort it takes to learn the rules. Heavy spending can also make a struggling game harder to abandon, the piece said, a trap known as sunk costs, in which a company keeps backing a project because it has already invested so much.
Fewer cards, clearer play
Haushalter said Mega Ball, Evolution’s bouncing-ball game that borrows from bingo and lotteries, is not really a flop but has gained only modest traction. Early on, players could buy many cards, which made it hard to follow what was happening on each one.
With Monopoly Big Baller, which also uses lines on cards, Evolution capped players at four cards. The core idea stayed, but the clutter went. Haushalter called it a small design change with a big lesson: More choice does not always mean more engagement.
Excitement offsets caution after failure
Haushalter warned that failure can leave companies afraid of repeating their mistakes, so teams start avoiding anything linked to a flop. That caution can be a problem, he said, because a good idea may be dropped simply because it appeared in a failed game.
At Evolution, teams discuss what did not work and test new ideas against past errors. Most ideas never become games; Haushalter thinks perhaps one in 10 does.
Still, the prospect of another hit keeps caution at bay. It “pushes you through and protects you from caution,” he said. According to Evolution Insights, a failed game cannot show a company how to make a hit. It simply proves that one of the company’s beliefs about its audience was wrong.
