DoubleDown: Women Bet More Than Men in Social Casino Games

DoubleDown is opening up its metrics, a bit. Today, it will disseminate a “social casino index” based on the gameplay data of six million monthly active users, showing where and how people play its social casino games.

For the most part, the report is just a science-y way of flaunting DoubleDown’s reach (and the company doubtless knows that trend-minded reporters are suckers for this sort of stuff). But John Clelland, global marketing VP at DoubleDown’s parent company, IGT, correctly highlighted one surprising factoid from the index.

“We had this belief that men would make the highest bets,” Clelland said. But, as it turns out, women who play DoubleDown’s games bet 30 percent more, on average.

It’s generally accepted that the social casino audience skews female, a consensus backed up by the index, which reported most of its audience to be “women between the ages of 45 and 55.” But free-to-play game spending, as a whole, skews heavily male. Earlier this year, a Frank N. Magid Associates study commissioned by payments platform PlaySpan found that men spend nearly three times more than women on virtual goods.

To be clear: That’s spending real money to buy virtual things, whereas DoubleDown is talking about betting virtual money. In other words, women are more willing to risk the casino currency they’ve won or bought, whereas men may be more willing to buy packs of that currency in the first place.

Clelland also noted that gameplay was heavily concentrated in states that offered either legalized gambling or where Native American casinos were accessible, which he chalked up to familiarity with the games available. IGT’s main business is the creation and distribution of old-fashioned slot machines, which is a common counterpart to many of the larger social casino game studios.