The average mobile user now opens an app, completes a task, and closes it once again in less than 90 seconds. This short-term behavior is what product teams are studying across a wide range of industries. They’re no longer able to rely on the playbooks they used during the 2010s to much success.
One of the most visible representations of this movement is in the explosive rise of crash-style titles like the Aviator game. This is a multiplayer format that lasts less than 60 seconds per round and is now one of the world’s most played online casino games. The design philosophy has been a big reason for its success, as there are shorter rounds, instant decision-making, social visibility, and transparent outcomes.
Many people from other industries are researching its success to glean some valuable insight that might help them with their own products. Industries are trying to adapt fast enough to ensure that they don’t get left behind in the new era of short sessions.
What Casino Product Teams Learned From Crash Games
One of the most important metrics that the online casino industry has measured is the time spent logged into their accounts. Land-based slots were engineered to keep players in their seats for many hours. This was aided by wait staff regularly delivering them drinks and food, minimizing the number of times they needed to get out of their seats, except for going to the toilet.
Online operators inherited this same type of mindset, as they attempted to optimize for session length above most other things. Crash games threw this model upside down. Its goal isn’t to pull players into a long and hypnotic loop.
Aviator builds its engagement through the micro decisions that players constantly make. This is when they place their wager, watch the multiplier climb, and decide ultimately when it is time to cash out, all within a minute. Players consciously choose to play again and aren’t stuck in a trance.
This is an important distinction as it changes the metrics to gauge engagement. Operators that offer crash games see significantly higher rounds per session and repeat visit frequency, even when the total time on device is lower. The product asks for much less than an hour of someone’s time. It looks for short bursts of 10 minutes here and there throughout a day.
The social aspects reinforce this, as there’s a built-in chat system, public bet displays and visible cashouts for other players. This means that every round is a shared event and not something isolated to an individual player.
The provably fair cryptographic criteria also add a level of trust that traditional casino products never offered. Players can verify that each round’s outcome wasn’t rigged, which removes one of the oldest friction points in online gambling.
The Metric Not Talked About
The main engagement metric used for many years among consumer tech investors was daily active users (DAU). This was a clean and comparable figure. However, it doesn’t tell you anything about whether an individual person only opened the app for a couple of minutes and didn’t return, versus someone who revisited the app more than ten times in a day.
Research published in Psychology Today looking at mobile attention patterns, highlights how users now showcase checking behavior whereby they have brief and repeated visits to apps, similar to how people once constantly checked their watches. This will be familiar to anyone who’s mindlessly opened the Instagram app only to realise that they did so only a few minutes ago. It’s nearly a force of habit rather than a conscious decision.
The implication is that if an app can’t deliver a complete and satisfying experience within two minutes, then it will lose to the app that can. The likes of TikTok proved it could do so with its endless stream of short videos and Aviator proved it in the world of online gambling.
What Comes Next
It’s clear that people in other industries will continue to borrow from the crash game playbook. The design choices that prove to be actually transferable versus only working where real money is on the line will be fascinating to watch.
The cash-out decision especially could be the most underrated innovation of the game. Allowing users to actively exit mid-experience creates a level of agency that most apps don’t offer. What is undeniably clear is that attempting to compete for hours of a user’s attention is ending.
The platforms that have success going forward will be able to deliver complete experiences in short time periods and go along with the rhythm of modern attention patterns.
