SportCaller launches Free Or 4 with William Hill to ramp retention on UK football

Free-to-play specialist is recruited to help drive engagement with intuitive “easy-trigger” game prizes for players of Leeds-based operator

SportCaller, the leading free-to-play (FTP) sports-game provider, has rolled out its latest game, Free Or 4, for Tier-1 operator William Hill, debuting the new football FTP last weekend to an immediate and appreciable spike in engagement.

Free Or 4 simply asks players to select six games in which they reckon three or four total goals will be scored from the Saturday long-list of 3pm UK kick-offs. Make six successful selections, and all correct entries will receive £200 in free sportsbook bets. However, there are also smaller, easy-trigger consolation prizes up for grabs for any customer picking just five, or even four, matches correctly.

The weekly game represents William Hill’s first return to football free-to-play since its Football21 game in 2018 which offered a £10k jackpot each week. Free Or 4 demonstrates an important change in FTP focus, moving away from low-probability prize pots as a means of mass-market acquisition to a far greater level of sophistication and appeal via attainable prizes as a robust method of retention.

Free Or 4 has been built in partnership with William Hill and SportCaller to promote retention, boosting the user experience on a sport whose domestic UK leagues always have a strong bearing on annual revenues. SportCaller continues to innovate new ways in which to acquire and retain repeat-customers at low cost, optimising William Hill’s dynamic customer-base, as the football season rebounds with a digital vengeance from behind closed doors.

The Dublin-based supplier allows its partners to launch a wide range of FTP prediction, jackpot and more hyper-casual game formats with seamless speed across any sport, language or territory via web, iOS, Play Store, Facebook Instant Games or Twitch extensions.

Liam Barbour, Head of Customer Product at William Hill, said: “It’s fantastic to broaden our ongoing collaboration with SportCaller and get back to free-to-play on football, sportsbook’s perennial revenue-driver. We took our time developing Free Or 4, working in tandem with numerous focus groups, customer research and testing so that we could establish a straightforward concept whose intuitive playability instantly resonated with our thriving client-base.

“The results have been both immediate and encouraging and I look forward to seeing how our customers engage with the game throughout the domestic football season. As ever, SportCaller’s gameplay finesse has helped enhance brand loyalty and digital dwell-time, proving themselves versatile masters in the competitive “attention economy” of modern engagement.”

Cillian Barry, MD at SportCaller, said: “Flexibility in the ideation and deployment of FTP games came to the fore during the sporting shutdown, but we’re seeing that trend extend in sync with the new normal. William Hill understand these shifting sands of engagement, so it was a great experience to work alongside their dedicated team, coupled with some illuminating focus-group feedback, to create a game with simplicity, universal appeal and a core retention mechanic at its heart.

“The early engagement levels have been impressive, while the conversion rates to active users speak directly to the trust and brand recognition which these simple “winnable” games can readily foster.”