Social casino games have grown substantially over the past five years. Caesars recently sold its social casino site, Playtika, for $4.4 billion. In Australia, prominent gambling researcher Sally Gainsbury, deputy director at the Gambling Treatment Clinic & Research Group, School of Psychology, University of Sydney, along with four of her colleagues produced a research paper called “Migration from Social Casino Games to Gambling: Motivations and Characteristics of Gamers who Gamble.” The paper was published by ePublications@SCU, which is an electronic repository administered by Southern Cross University Library. With 510 respondents, the chart on the below outlines the motivations for playing social casino games (SCGs), broken down by those who were influenced to gamble real money by playing social casino games, and those who were not. The second chart, featuring 110 respondents, reveals the motivation behind the desire to play real-money games for those who started with social casino games. To download a copy of the full paper, visit works.bepress.com/sally_gainsbury.
