How Much Can Casino Games Develop, Anyway?

This blog is all about the various ways in which currently existing technology can potentially enrich the online casino market and make online gambling a more fun, immersive experience for everyone. But the keyword in that sentence is “potentially”. I’m not an industry insider with access to the latest technology in the realm of online casinos, nor am I a prophet or a time traveler who knows exactly what’s going to happen in the next 10-15 years. All I can do, as a guy who likes to keep up with current trends and play online blackjack every once in a while, is speculate. That’s it. I can say stuff like “Hey, I think it would be cool if these VR headsets that are all the rage now start getting used for online gambling”, but the truth is, I’ve got no idea if my kids are going to be playing their online casinos with VR glasses or if they’ll be staring at a screen clicking a mouse like the first people who played online roulette did almost 20 years ago. Because, let’s face it, online casinos aren’t exactly the most progressive.

And don’t get me wrong – they do make progress sometimes. The addition of mobile casino is the most recent example I can think of which proves that online gambling can develop in new and exciting areas. However, compare that to an area like, say, videogames, and there’s really no contest. When you take an online blackjack game from 2001 and compare it to an online blackjack game from 2016, you’re really not going to find a whole lot of difference there. On the other hand, compare a game that was released in 2001 to a game that was released in 2016, and you’ll see that they’re not even close! The same could be said for mobile gaming. Remember back in the good old days, when we used to play “Snake” on our old Nokias? Well, those days are now gone, and we can now download and play pretty much anything on our phones and tablets. Casual puzzle games which are taken one bite at a time are most popular, but other than that, there’s also fighting games, visual novels, RPGs, simulators, 3D action and horror games… It’s insane just how many different experiences you can have right there on your phone, limited solely by the amount of space on your hard drive… And yet online casino hasn’t really done much to catch up to its big brothers in the interactive entertainment industry. Why is that?

Well, it’s certainly not for lack of ideas, as this very blog can show you, or for lack of funding, as a single look at the online casino industry’s global profits can show you. I think that it mostly has to do with the fact that there’s no real market need for innovation. Videogames are all about providing new experiences to people – that’s literally what they are! Whether it’s a casual mobile game like “Candy Crush Saga” which you play for five minutes while waiting for a doctor’s appointment or a highly immersive VR experience like “Robinson” which allows you to dive into a completely new world in every sense, videogames thrive on allowing players to do all sorts of different things. Variety is key here. Online casinos, on the other hand, don’t really need to do that. They serve a very particular, singular purpose, and as such have little need to expand beyond it. I mean, I gave mobile gambling as a positive example of online casino development earlier, but the truth is that mobile casinos are all but forgotten nowadays – that’s not really what most gamblers want. People don’t go to online casinos for an experience, they’ve got real casinos for that! They go there to play casino games in a nice and simple fashion, and at the end of the day, shouldn’t that be the focus? After all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? Who knows, maybe at some point in the future a brave entrepreneur is going to step up and offer an online casino which breaks the mold and offers all kinds of new experiences that other casinos have been too afraid to try, and if that turns out to be successful it could bring all manners of change to the online gambling industry. Until then, though, we’re left to speculate about what could be rather than about what will. And that’s a bit of a shame, all things considered.