Light Entertainment Accompanies Gaming to Expand the Casino’s Attractiveness
There are so many online casinos that one of the great challenges has always been how to get players to stay on the casino and not roam. One method has been to offer daily, weekly, and monthly casino bonuses in addition to welcome bonuses, free spins, and the like.
Heavy Download No Longer Necessary
Another method that has fallen to the side was to get players to download the casino to their hard drive. This in a sense “captured” the casino. The graphics on games not in the download platform was not very good so players willingly downloaded the casino. Instant Play has practically done away with downloading because the graphics are exponentially better than they have ever been and using the Instant Play format allows players to wander around the internet looking for great casinos.
Challenge to Keep Players
This leaves intact the casino’s need to maintain loyalty among their players. Casinos have developed many ways to entice loyalty. One is simply the Loyalty Program where every bet becomes points which can be converted into cash. Casinos offer tournaments, games from multiple providers, different promotions, lower play through requirements for redeeming bonus money, fast withdrawals, banking with bitcoin, and many others.
LetsBet Begins
The news is that LetsBet has started operations. The LetsBet concept is that players need much more than bonuses and tournaments to keep them playing at any given casino. LetsBet will have a daily talk show accompanying the basic gaming opportunities offered by any online casino.
The news reports stated that it took a full year of planning to get this venture off the ground and running. Aside from the technical challenges, the company had to find the right hosts and they needed to have a large library of conversations and “events” to include in the talk show lineup.
The conversations and interviews will cover every subject that goes into everyday small talk conversations from food to weather to sports. The talk show will highlight non-political news such as the opening of a grand shopping mall, a new restaurant craze, the progress of local teams in international sports tournaments, and interviews with personalities in many fields. The concept sees the talk show as strictly soft news so there will be some gossip, trivia quizzes, and casino news.
LetsBet will also facilitate interaction between viewers and the talk show hosts. Viewers will be able to ask questions of the people being interviewed.
Streaming Live
Entertainment in the modern world is based on streaming rather than television technology of the past. Many viewers have left cable in favor of the streaming providers. This applies in every area of entertainment. Sports cable stations are losing viewers who can access streamed games live through sports betting sites.
Michael Pedersen, CEO of LetsBet said that, “We have reinvented the online casino experience to offer a more lively and social atmosphere, quite close to the feeling you have when entering a land based casino with your friends.”
This statement speaks directly to the one greatest disadvantage online casinos have always had in comparison to land based casinos: the ambience at a land based casino is full of excitement, cheering coming from the craps and roulette tables, lights flashing and bells ringing. Online casino gaming offers a long list of advantages that include saving time and money not needing to travel and so on.
Social Media
But online casinos could never compete with the atmosphere at a land based casino. The hope behind the LetsBet start up is that couples or groups will enjoy the talk show so much that they will watch it together and will play some casino games at the same time. In this way, LetsBet is saying that the online casino of the future will recognize that social networking is so important in modern society that, even by way of an online casino, people want to expand the range of social contacts.
Millennials Welcome
This also is a strong statement that the group of players long thought to be the bulwark of the online casino market—elderly gamers for whom travel to a land based casino is difficult—is no longer the demographic that will move the online casino industry in the future.
People who rely on social media for their connection to the outside world will also be able to create social groups through the casino. A messaging platform was designed for in-house social networking.
There has long been the thought that online casino players are not social creatures—that they come to online casinos strictly to play and pass the time. LetsBet is challenging that notion. The old thinking was that the games were by far the most important aspect of online gaming. The industry even coined a term: gamification.
LetsBet says that it is combining gamification with social networking and live streaming to create an entirely different online casino experience.
Visual Messaging
LetsBet also demonstrates its commitment to lean interfaces. The casinos that came online in the 1990’s and in the first decade of this century often featured many words on the home page. In the last five years or so, that trend has changed dramatically. Casino home pages today use color and graphics to deliver their message with only enough words to help get the message across.
Game Play from the Outset
LetsBet utilizes the theme of recruiting secret agents. Every new player becomes a secret agent recruit. They have to fulfill certain missions to advance within the “agency”.
Multiple Providers
LetsBet features games from several game providers including Microgaming, NetEnt, Quickspin, Yggdrasil, and Evolution Gaming. The casino has begun in the Swedish market with plans to quickly move into the broader Scandinavian market.
If the concept catches on, it will sweep the online gaming business the way better mobile graphics swept the industry in the last decade.
