Every so often it is possible to discern burgeoning trends in the online casino niche. In the past, we saw casinos begin to offer massive welcome bonuses. Their offers expanded to include no deposit bonuses as well as deposit bonuses using specific bonus codes.
Online casinos have experimented with many different types of promotions. Some promotions come and go and some, such as Loyalty Points and VIP Clubs, have endured the test of time.
Online casinos were the first to see the potential in mobile gaming. They were the first to initiate Live Casino gaming from an online platform, thus recreating to some extent the atmosphere at land based casinos that so many gamblers like.
Time of Uncertainty
Online casinos are at something of a crossroads. Many jurisdictions are wary of legalizing online casinos as they feel it is harder to determine the correct level of taxes to be funneled into government treasuries. Yet, there are thousands of online casinos vying for a piece of the multi-billion dollar online casino pie.
Sports betting is the single fastest growing niche in gambling generally. The United States has just legalized sports betting in any state that wishes to regulate it. Most states want sports betting to be done through land based casinos, a move that will take some players away from their favorite online casinos for the time they are at a land based casino placing sports bets.
Modern Online Casino Trends
Here are a few of the most prominent trends that will make online gaming more interesting and fun in the here and now and going forward.
Live Casino
Live casino was almost an afterthought to most online casino managers just a decade or so ago. Live Casino proved popular with many players accessing their casinos Live Casino platform but the graphics weren’t good and the atmosphere was contrived.
Online casino managers realized, however, that they needed to improve their Live Casinos because their customers wanted it. Some experimented with Playboy Bunnies as dealers but it proved less popular than expected.
One casino entertained to a proposal to train kittens to be dealers. That idea never got off the ground even though the entrepreneur with the idea had ready answers for every question.
Robotics will certainly enter the Live Casino niche soon as so many people have found life-size dolls to be good “companions”.
Instant Play
Instant Play is a major trend in that it features excellent graphics and eliminates the need to download the casino. This has already set in motion a major trend in which players play at several casinos. No longer will a casino market itself as being the favorite casino of millions of gamers. Instead they will market themselves as one of several casinos that make up a “portfolio” of casinos for the average gamer.
The natural outgrowth of this trend will be mergers among casino groups.
Mobile
By now, every online casino understands that mobile is the default platform for casino gaming. Everything online casinos do going forward will be geared toward mobile gaming and, in a huge reversal, desktop casinos will be seen as adjuncts of mobile casinos.
3-D
Many games have a kind of 3-D aspect to them but online games have lagged behind in this important modern aspect of gaming. The first group of games that has seen a large increase in 3-D imagery is slots but all casino games are not far behind. There will soon come a blackjack game in which the dealer actually deals the cards as if it were a land based casino.
Gamification
This hyper-modern term refers to seeing aspects of game play in everyday experiences. As a trend in online casino play, we can expect online casinos to hold webinars that explain how playing blackjack or poker can assist young professionals to get ahead in their companies and professions.
Although no one it seems to be acknowledging the great contribution made to the concept of gamification by Robert Pirsig in his book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, he deserves a great deal of credit for starting the concept gestating in other people’s minds.
Pirsig’s idea was that all jobs are boring at a basic level because they are repetitive. In order to make them less boring but, even better, to give them enduring interest so we can continue to perform them at a high level of excellence, we need to find the game aspect in our work. He called the game aspect Quality and developed a full philosophy from the term.
As far as gamification is concerned, a slot is not a slot anymore; it is an aspect of real life, and even a game of chance like slots can have important value in our everyday lives.
Intellectual Gaming
Many people have come to realize that there may be a direct health benefit to playing thinking games rather than always playing pure games of chance such as slots, roulette, and craps. The two most cerebral casino games are poker and blackjack.
These two games are getting more play from online casino players and the game providers have already understood that they need to upgrade the graphics on these games in order to attract and retain players. At the present time, the age group that is looking to blackjack and pork as entertainments that keep their brains healthy are the over-50 cohort. The challenge to casinos and providers is to further develop these games and others as well that will attract younger players.
Graphics and animation will play a major role in the development of poker and blackjack for the new era that will see game-playing as part of a healthy living regimen.
