Exclusive interview w/ Henry McLean, Co-founder, Commercial & Marketing Director 4ThePlayer about First Look Games

What challenges has 4ThePlayer faced when it comes to game promotion?

For us, promotion is not really a challenge, but we have to make sure any promotion has the maximum impact. We are a boutique slot house, not a factory, so we have more invested in every game and we want to ensure that each game hits its maximum potential.

We don’t just release games and hope they’re successful: we want to create a story. We have a multi-pronged strategy to drive the success of every game we make. First Look Games is part of that strategy!

What made you decide to use First Look Games to help with this?

First Look Games gives us more extensive reach with affiliates. We have direct relationships with a lot of affiliates, but it’s impossible to have close relationships with all of them.

Likewise, First Look Games is always onboarding new affiliates, which saves us a lot of time and gives us an ‘affiliate tail’ that we would otherwise probably not reach.

When we do a premium release, it’s always great to see new affiliates – even those we didn’t already know – pop up and write about our games.

First Look Games are always innovating on their platform and adding new features. For example, they created the UKGC-compliant free demo tool as a response to regulatory changes.

That is exactly why we have renewed First Look Games for 2023: we almost see it as an additional person on our marketing team!

How has First Look Games helped you drive awareness of your games/studio?

In such a crowded market place, it’s essential to be noticed – and to be noticed for the right reasons! 4ThePlayer has the reasons to be noticed, but First Look Games helps us drive more awareness of those reasons.

For example, our next premium game release, 3 Lucky Leprechauns, has a clear message: that the game was made to be super active with a very frequent bonus and a realistic max win of 5,000X that pays out regularly. With First Look Games, we can drive this message to affiliates and properly target the main market for the game (in this case, the UK).

Just how effective are affiliates at this?

Affiliates are a key part of our promotional strategy and of the multi-prong approach I mentioned earlier.

In a similar manner to how the film industry heavily uses reviewers to drive demand and create a story about each film release, we drive demand and interest in our games. Affiliates are one of the effective ways we can do this.

Has it helped drive awareness among operators as well as players? How?

It is all part of the marketing mix. The more awareness of a game, the better – although affiliates are more about targeting players directly than targeting operators for us.

That said, if you made a Venn diagram of slot fans versus operators, you’d see that a lot of operators are themselves players – so with affiliates you can still target them, but in a different way!

Anything else to add?

It’s been great speaking with you about First Look Games! If anyone would like to hear more about us and what is coming, be sure to check our social media (Twitter / LinkedIn)