Slots Play Casinos covers primarily the online casino market and bonuses are a big part of the attraction of online casinos. So, it is only natural to ask why online casinos offer thousands of dollars in deposit bonuses and also hundreds of dollars in no-deposit bonuses.
Instant Play Has Had a Major Effect on Online Casinos
Instant Play is a feature offered by all (certainly most) online casinos. This feature allows you to play at an online casino directly on your server. It means that you don’t have to download a heavy online casino to your hard drive. In fact, many of our casinos are moving away from the download option altogether – keeping it only for existing players using it, but not offering it to new players.
For gamers, the flexibility of being able to play at many online casinos is a huge draw. For individual online casinos, it is mostly a problem of what is called retention in business.
A lot of businesses have their own form of bonuses. An ice cream shop might have a punch card where for every ten ice cream cones, you get one free. This works well, especially in the summer when people tend to eat a lot of ice cream.
Many retail stores have a “club” of sorts where people earn points and get discounts in their birthday month.
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Retention means that a casino, or any business, seeks to develop loyal customers. These customers come back again and again because the company, or the casino, provides both goods and services that satisfy customers.
Online casinos discovered that bonuses are a great way to nurture loyalty in their gamers. This is one of the basic reasons why online casinos offer bonuses.
How Much is That Bonus in the Window?
So many online casinos offer bonuses in their promotions or in their Welcome Packages that now online casinos have to compete with each other on the size of the bonuses offered. This has created inflation in online casino bonuses. This is another great benefit to players!
Bonuses at Land-based Casinos
The kind of bonuses that online casinos can offer are non-existent at land-based casinos. One reason is that land-based casinos have so much more overhead than online casinos have. Therefore, they can’t afford to give bonuses that reach several thousand dollars just for coming through the door.
The Wagering Requirement and Online Casino Bonuses
The wagering requirement makes it impossible for a player to take a bonus and cash out right away. You have to bet a set factor of the bonus before you can withdraw any winnings. For most gamers, it takes time to complete a wagering requirement and time is something that players at land-based casinos do not have.
Let’s take a $5000 bonus and a 30x wagering requirement. That means that the player has to bet $150,000 before he or she can withdraw winnings. There may very well be winnings if the player has played well and is lucky. But it takes quite some time to reach $150,000 in bets. Most players bet modestly and it takes a lot of $5 bets to reach $150,000!
That Darn Player’s Card
At a land-based casino, every player gets a player’s card where the wins and losses are registered. Any bonus that a casino might have offered will be there too. Let’s say that a gamer had a 125% bonus up to $1000. That means that they had to deposit $800 in order to get the full bonus.
Now, if they went home before completing the wagering requirement, they would have $800 sitting on their player’s card waiting for them to go back to that casino with the card.
At an online casino, the same $800 are waiting for the gamer to complete the wagering requirement. The difference is in the number of times a player can play at an online casino in the time between another player’s visits to a land-based casino!
We say that online players play many times per six months to a year.
That’s why online casinos can offer bonuses and land-based casinos cannot.
Some Bonuses are Not Exactly Bonuses
We are returning here to another comparison between online casinos and land-based casinos. Online casinos can still pay out 3-2 for a blackjack while many land-based casinos have gone to paying out 6-5 for a blackjack. in video poker, online casinos still pay 9-6 for a full house and a flush while many land-based casinos now pay out 8-5 or even 7-5 for the same two hands.
Furthermore, gamers should know that online casinos generally have a return to player rate of 96-97% in slots while land-based casinos have a return to player rate that usually ranges from 85-92%.
Comp Points Grow Online Fast
Comp points is the most common name for a promotion that acts like a no deposit bonus. Players earn points as they play. Since online gamers play more than land-based players their comp points grow fast. When they reach a given point, the gamer can redeem the points for casino credits.
Land-based casinos also offer comp points but then that darn player’s card holds a player’s comp points for months, years, or forever when the player goes home. So, we say that the comp points promotion is a true bonus type of promotion while the same offer at a land-based casino may never get redeemed.
What Do Online Gamers Get for Their Loyalty?
The fact is that modern online casino gamers do not see playing at just one online casino a sign of loyalty. Online gamers play at online casinos for the bonuses and also for all of the other benefits of gaming at online casinos.
These include comfort and convenience, more games to choose from, the chance to play hundreds of games over time (land-based casino players rarely play even as many as 10 games in a long weekend at the casinos), the variety of the games offered at online casinos, and many other advantages of online casino gaming.
In a sense, the bonuses online casinos offer are like the frosting on the cake for the other benefits of gaming online! Still, the Welcome Package is usually the first thing a gamer sees when they go to an online casino’s home page. So, for reasons of attractivity and retention, bonuses will likely continue to be the leading component that makes a gamer stop at a home page and look further.
Slots Play Casinos Covers the Online Casino Market
Here at Slots Play Casinos, we recognize both the vast advantages gamers have at online casinos and the continuing attraction some players have toward land-based casinos.
We offer gamers reviews of both types of casinos and much more. Our guides and articles are great fonts of information for all casino gamers.
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