Marketing: Learn Reinvention from Roulette

On paper, roulette, the casino game, should defy reinvention. It’s a game dependent on its simplicity, owing its fame to the fact there’s nothing more to it than throwing a ball into a spinning wheel – at least, on paper.

The game actually has a complex list of betting strategies, regional variations, and some modern tweaks that have helped it settle into the digital age.

Sell the Wheel

Regional variations are where roulette’s story begins.

The most popular variants you can play today are European, French and American Roulette games. iGaming companies now offer multiple regional variations of roulette online to ensure every player can play the specific version they prefer. For example, the casino roulette at Paddy’s features the three most popular regional variations: European, French, and American roulette.

What sets these apart from each other, besides using words like La Partage, En Prison, and Douzaine in the French version, is how many zeroes are on the wheel. American games have a “0” and a “00”. European and French games just have the former.

Oddly enough, when bringing the game to the states, the American’s broke every rule of traditional marketing, a term explained by Indeed. This break of convention then inevitably made the game less appealing to players than its European counterparts.

With more slots on the wheel, it’s a harder game to win, and more lucrative for the casino or “house”. However, as the American variant has the daunting five-number bet (1, 2, 3, 0, and 00), it offers a unique opportunity for high-rollers.

French is the most popular version of roulette because the house “edge”, i.e. how much the casino stands to earn from a bet, is so low.

Having fewer pockets on the wheel generally means a higher edge. So, American roulette, with 38 slots for the ball to fall into, has an edge of 5.26% while the French variant (37 pockets) can have an edge as low as 1.35%.

French roulette markets itself – but the passage of time tends to diminish reputations, ensuring that developers need to find new ways to sell the wheel.

Authentic Experience

Ironically, reinventing roulette didn’t alter the core gameplay. The game has held a captive audience since before the United States existed. Yet simple tweaks managed to produce new experiences. Adding bet multipliers produced Quantum Roulette and Lucky 6 Roulette, for instance. Speed Roulette cut rounds down to just 25 seconds.

Perhaps the most unexpected twist in online roulette was the return of human dealers. Using sound stages and streaming technology, operators placed croupiers back in charge of the action. Cards are dealt by hand the old-fashioned way, ironically enough.

Red Door Roulette Live and Sticky Bandits Roulette Live use costumes and set dressing, a trend that could allow seasonal versions of the game, such as Halloween. 

Roulette’s recent identity shifts are designed to provide a more authentic experience to the player. Immersive Roulette uses multiple camera angles to create a cinematic effect. Similarly, first-person variants of the game take cues from movies like Hardcore Henry, a film shot entirely from the protagonist’s perspective. Again, these adjustments change little about the gameplay itself. 

Roulette is perhaps an unlikely candidate for reinvention, given that it remained mostly the same for a century or more. Still, it does offer an example of how only minor changes can renovate an older design.