The online casino sector has long sought to distinguish itself from its brick-and-mortar rivals by leaning into innovation and capturing market share where legacy casinos cannot follow. As such, it should come as no surprise that the smartphone has come to represent a huge boon in the fortunes of this burgeoning sector.
But how exactly has the smartphone changed the way we access online gaming platforms today, and what does the future hold for this fruitful collaboration between product and hardware?
Widespread Mobile Optimization
While it may seem a more subtle point, the implications of it cannot be understated. Since the rise of the smartphone in the early 2010s, more and more casinos operating online have sought to redesign their websites, clients, apps and interfaces to suit the mobile form factor.
This is a huge shift, as for almost 30 years it was the PC form-factor and design approach that reigned supreme. Some of these changes are more pronounced than others, it should be noted. At a bare minimum, it’s now rare to find a casino platform that doesn’t seek to render its websites in a way that suits the design approach and methodologies of touch-screen mobile displays.
However, this impact is also resulting in more and more developers building games from the ground up to suit this interface – even eschewing the legacy landscape viewing orientation for the increasingly popular portrait mode.
This may come as no surprise to modern mobile users who have got used to watching TikToks, Instagram Reels and other forms of vertical video content on social media – but it signals an important sea-change. This is because in developing for mobile, said studios are increasingly willing to compromise on the traditional desktop experience – banking on the fact that a growing majority of gamers will be accessing its products through their smartphones.
Accessible Promotional Models
Online casinos have come to enjoy their preeminent position in the wider gambling industry thanks in no small part to their innovative approach to marketing. There is a long history of providing casino patrons with a selection of offers and deals in a bid to attract new players and outcompete rival venues – this is nothing new.
However, when it comes to traditional brick-and-mortar venues, the most effective means of going about this is to pitch your offers in a way that appeals to the widest number of different people.
While this strategy works well, it restricts you from being able to offer special deals to niche interests which may result in a high conversion rate. This is precisely what online casinos have endeavored to do. As there is no minimum of room in a digital environment, the sector has been empowered to offer hundreds of highly specific offers in a bid to attract players with diverse interests and requirements.
This process has only been supercharged by the growing pre-eminence of the smartphone, as this device platform by nature is accessed by a broader demographic than conventional desktop PCs and laptops.
In light of this, dedicated platforms such as casinobonusca have established themselves as digital hubs that collate these various deals and offers into convenient searchable lists.
This enables mobile gamers to peruse a huge selection of competitive welcome offers and other bonuses – whether they’re a slots aficionado looking for a deal on free spins, or a high roller looking for no deposit free bets on high stake casinos.
What’s more, as mobile gamers grow increasingly habituated to this way of accessing gaming platforms, the number of potential deals available to those looking to play on-demand is only growing as the smartphone continues to become the world’s dominant gaming hardware.
New Markets
Much of this change is coming about because of the much larger prospective market ceiling offered by mobile casino gaming. Over the past ten years, around 2 billion new people began to regularly use the internet, and a further 1 billion is estimated to join them over the coming ten years. Crurically, the vast majority of these new users are coming online via smartphones. After all, these devices are comparatively more affordable, accessible and useful for people around the world, especially those in developing economies.
With the largest growth areas for the smartphone – and thus by turn, the online casino industry – being in regions of Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Island Southeast Asia where cellular connections are more effective and immediately accessible, it’s unsurprising why the sector is counting on mobile for its future growth.
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