Mobile phones have come an incredibly long way since the bulky boxes that became mainstream in the late 80s and 90s. Screens are several inches wide and boast hundreds of thousands of pixels, internet connectivity is lightning quick and available almost everywhere and cameras are into the 20 megapixel range as standard. Many of us live our lives on our phones, with a recent Deloitte study showing that a large chunk of us will even check our phones halfway through the night. With this, big businesses have seen millions of opportunities to make some money out of our dependency on mobile devices.
One area which has seen a surge in growth is mobile gaming. As processing power, built in memory, storage and graphics capabilities have improved dramatically, the quality of mobile games has gone from simple pieces of software to pass time whilst on the move to vast, engaging series’ which generate billions of dollars in revenue each year. A sub-industry which has really managed to ride this wave of success is online gambling, with gaming companies now fully entrenched in mobile technology and aiming to develop market share by releasing better and more complex experiences for gamers.
There are so modern features found on smartphones that online casinos can benefit from. Gambling is heavily reliant on enticing new players, as well as keeping new players coming back for more. Walk into any casino and the atmosphere is designed to amaze and engage. From developing ambient settings to choosing right kind of music, a lot of money is spent ensuring that the environment that gamers spend time in is absolute perfect. The key to the casino winning in the long run is to keep players gambling for as long as possible. Even if there are some winners, they will eventually end up paying it all back if they gamble for enough time. Keeping people at the tables and in a constantly exciting situation is difficult to manage in real life, so imagine the challenges faced by online game designers who have seconds to not only catch people’s attention, but make them invest time and money in a particular game.
If you wanted to gamble online around 10 years ago, your options were quite limited. You would have to find a PC, navigate to a web page, log in to your preferred platform, deposit funds by manually entering your bank details. Only then would you have access to fairly limited online games with often mediocre graphics and a distinct lack of that ‘casino feel’. Today, online gambling is made incredibly easy by ultra-accessible mobile technology. Nearly every online casino or gaming brand has an app, which can sometimes be unlocked by a single password or even a thumbprint. Contactless technology, card scanning or highly secure banking integration makes depositing money easy. Instead of connecting to Wi-Fi or finding an internet cafe, players use 3G or 4G and soon 5G to play at lightning speeds. Online gambling can take place quite literally anywhere, anytime thanks to modern smartphones.
As mentioned, older online games were frankly dull. HTML and Flash were fairly modern at the time, but some of the older slot games and poker room interfaces look frankly archaic compared to the slick, 3D environments that can be rendered by improved graphics chipsets found in almost every Smartphone today. Games such as blackjack which relies on the interactions between players and dealers to make the game super-exciting, is now benefiting from a huge technological advance that would have been impossible on older mobiles; Live Casino. Players can interact with professional dealers over a real time HD video streaming, something being pushed to the forefront of their offerings by big online casino operators like 888casino, in addition to their RNG software games 888casino lets you play live casino with real live dazzling dealers that will even greet you by your name, real cards and real roulette wheels all through a great high quality video stream making online gaming more interactive and satisfying for everyone.
Online gaming companies have certainly been early adopters to technological advances, so games and features will only improve as the next generation of smartphones begin to emerge. Next-step technologies like VR will really bring live casino to life when smartphone software is capable of supporting HD, 360 degree, 3D real-time environments. It will be interesting to see if physical casinos can survive if the online experience outstrips the original.