Definition
A social casino is a game or app that offers casino-style content — slots, poker, bingo, table games — played with virtual currency that has no cash-out value. Players receive a starting balance of virtual coins and can buy more with real money to keep playing, but winnings cannot be withdrawn.
It is legally a video game rather than gambling in most jurisdictions, so it is available on mainstream app stores and can be advertised on channels closed to real-money gambling.
Social casino monetises like a free-to-play mobile game: a small share of players (payers) buy coin packs, and revenue is concentrated in a minority of high spenders. The metrics are mobile-gaming metrics — install-to-payer conversion, ARPDAU, payer retention, coin-pack purchase frequency — rather than deposit and NGR.
It is a large industry in its own right and a common entry point or adjacency for real-money operators.
In context
For affiliates, social casino offers are a distinct vertical with its own economics. They pay on installs or on first coin-pack purchase (a CPI or CPP model) rather than on a real-money deposit, and because the product is not gambling, they can run on Facebook, Google, TikTok and app-store ads with far less restriction than a real-money casino — which makes traffic cheaper and more scalable but also more competitive.
Player value is lower and behaves like a mobile game's payer curve.
Social casino also sits adjacent to real-money iGaming in useful ways: some operators run a social-casino app as a top-of-funnel product and cross-promote real-money play to users in markets where that is legal; and the sweepstakes-casino model is a related structure that adds a redeemable prize layer. An affiliate deciding whether to work social casino should treat it as mobile-game user acquisition — optimise to payer conversion and ARPDAU, expect store-driven measurement constraints on iOS, and pick offers whose payer retention justifies the install cost — rather than applying real-money casino assumptions about deposit value and RevShare.
Worked example
An affiliate adds a social-casino offer that pays $6 per first coin-pack purchase. It runs on TikTok and Facebook with none of the restrictions its real-money casino offers face, at a $2.10 CPI and an 18% install-to-payer rate.
It optimises to the payer event and treats the offer like mobile-game UA, not like a casino CPA.
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