What’s in a Brand Name?
Unless you’re living in the middle of nowhere, you probably only need to take a few steps out of your house before you’re greeted with a familiar brand name. Wherever you look from your TV screen to your TV dinner packaging, from your clothes to your car bonnet, brands are ubiquitous, and the trend is there to be seen in the online casinos of the world too.
We’ve come a long way from the days of casino aisles full of fruit-depicting pokeys, and whenever you see a casino game in this day and age, there’s a high probability that you’ll see a big brand name too.
What’s on the market?
The bigger and stronger the brand, the better it’s likely to do on the casino market. Recent years have seen major advances from slots branded with the heroes of fantasy films and TV shows, like Marvel’s Thor franchise, and the HBO smash hit Game of Thrones, whose scheming and salacious stars have proven a hit with players at popular sites including Mrsmithcasino.com. There’s a dizzying array of big brands on the online slots market, from big screen titans like the aforementioned to the likes of Mermaid Millions, a major name that originated in the online gaming industry and has since developed a vast following.
A touch of escapism
So where lies the appeal of these branded slots? What is it that keeps us coming back for more? Why favour an Imp and a Kingslayer over a bar and some cherries? One possible explanation is that we all thirst for a touch of escapism in our free time. This is precisely the reason we flock to bold and fantastical entertainment brands like Game of Thrones in the first place, so it would make sense for the trend to translate into our online gaming habits too.
Brands and identity formation
If you’re just playing any old slots game, you’re just playing a slots game. How vanilla! Choose a bold brand and it says a little more about you, about your taste. Every choice we make in life is likely to be influenced on a sub-conscious level at least by both our own self-image and the image we wish to project to other people, from where we choose to sit on the bus to the brands we choose to adorn the fabric of our lives with. Who wants to play a simple fruit machine when you could choose to identify with the most dynamic and evocative brands in the entertainment industry?