The advance of science and technology is what keeps the market alive, offering us more and more innovations and allowing people to want things they didn’t know about before the daily newscast. It’s true for the online gambling niche, as well as for all the others. The gambling technologies weren’t progressing a lot since the random number generator was first used in the slot machine, but the casino industry was affected by other inventions. These inventions have pretty much changed the lives of almost every person on Earth in one way or another. Here we’ll talk about:
- Computers;
- Mobile devices;
- Virtual reality.
The last but not least comes the main topic: how has technology changed the casino industry.
Computers and Their Role in Online Gambling
It might sound a bit farfetched, but whether there were no computers, online gambling wouldn’t exist either. Computers started what gambling enthusiasts anticipated for decades: the beginning of decentralized gambling, free of casino monopoly. Less then thirty years ago you had to go to a land-based casino if you wanted to play some casino games legally and freely. Imagine how great it was to be a fan of, let’s say, blackjack, and to live in a country or a state where gambling is prohibited, or where gambling venues are allocated in a separate city or province! Since computers became a part of our lives, there’s no problem with that at all, because one can play in the comfort of their home and there’s no need to go anywhere.
In the late nineties, gambling technologies were focused on satisfying the PC gambling audience, and the niche started to grow exponentially. The reason for that was simple: land-based casinos couldn’t get much better. They already had it all: best treatment, best hotels, best entertainment, best food, and best drinks. After all, there’s a level of luxury you cannot surpass if you’re not catering to multi-millionaires only, and land-based casinos in all popular gambling destinations, such as Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Macau, Monte Carlo, and many others have reached this level long ago. With such rapid growth gamblers’ appetites grew even more, and mobile gambling became the new black.
Mobile Gambling
As soon as mobile devices became capable of supporting casino software, first mobile casinos and mobile apps appeared on the market. Crude and mockable at first, they improved over the years and attracted even more players than the desktop PC casinos did. Currently, more than 55% of online gamblers play via their mobile devices, and the numbers keep growing every year. Who knows, maybe the whole gambling industry will soon become a huge catalog of mobile applications, or maybe some other cutting-edge gambling technology will appear to come for the throne of entertainment.
When it comes to that, we even have some thoughts about what form of casino gaming will be the next thing.
VR Technologies
Even having in mind the skyrocketed popularity of mobile casinos, gambling and casino industry giants are trying to be one step ahead of everyone else and presented us with the latest major improvement so far: Virtual Reality gambling! Not that it can impress someone since almost every branch of entertainment tries to turn VR now, but the quality of these attempts is quite low, and the one who does at least something gets the whole pot. VR is here to combine the comfort and easy accessibility of online casinos with all those beautiful colors and the specific atmosphere of the land-based venues. Except for that, VR makes an Xzibit move and turns your visit to an online gambling site into a game so that you could play the game while you’re playing other games. There are not many VR casinos for now, but the online gambling market demands a constant renewal of assortment, and there’s going to be more of them soon.
Can We Go Any Further?
When we’re trying to figure out how has technology changed the casino industry we’re missing an important detail: the casino industry in itself is a leap of technology. Games of chance, with their complex rules and perfectly balanced strategies, should be considered as miracles, especially if you keep in mind that many of them are hundreds or even thousands of years old. The people who created these games were geniuses of their ages, and they left their trace in history by adding fruits of their intellectual work to a long list of gambling entertainment. When we think that gambling as a niche has achieved everything it could – we’re probably wrong. There is much more space for expansion, and judging by the development of the gaming industry, we should wait for a major gamification trend in online casinos.
Young people don’t want to spin the reels with fruits, bells, numbers, and letters since they can enjoy Red Dead Redemption, God of War, or The Witcher 3. And there is the only way to attract the younger audience to casinos – to make them more interesting. Achievements, level-ups, easter eggs, storylines, and many other goodies are on the way, and in a few years, we’ll see slot machines becoming way more interesting and technologically advanced than they are now.
As for now – there still are many ways to improve the industry and gambling technologies in general. Many top-notch software providers and reputable casino operators are already developing their products only with mobile users in mind, considering desktop users as the secondary course. Let’s hope that most owners will soon understand that you can attract more customers by making your gambling venue better than by giving nonsensical promises.