Mobile Casino Game Downloads Have Surged 20% - Here Are Some Other Trends Catching Our Eye

But the march of technology is relentless, with the rise of the smartphone and tablet not only did it become possible to play games on the move, but these games also became more sophisticated and varied than ever before. The graphics improved, enhancing the player experience, and more and more people switched to mobile as their preferred method of interacting with iGaming experiences.

This meant that any online casino hoping to succeed would have to have a compelling mobile offering. Mobile play continues to go from strength to strength, enjoying a reported 20% rise in downloads of apps in the last year alone. All of the best online roulette providers at Onlinecasino.ca have a mobile app, often incentivizing players to download it through bonuses. But this isn’t the only trend that is affecting the sector, so let’s take a deep dive.

It’s long been the aim of the online casino to make the experience as involving and immersive as possible. Many have already moved a long way towards this by introducing the live casino in which games are streamed directly to players. Now there’s a trend to create new variations on existing games as well to introduce whole new concepts. Similarly, there’s a real drive to make playing on sites a more communal and social experience by introducing multiplayer games. The theory behind this is that it will both build individual engagement as well as developing a loyal following around specific games. The ultimate aim may be to allow players to set up their own fan-groups and online forums in the same way we can see has evolved with many video games.

While still very much in its infancy in the context of online casinos, virtual reality is another tool set to be used to augment both of the previous two trends. By inviting players into virtual casino environment alongside others or, at least, their online avatars, this will be the closest that it’s possible to get to being in a casino itself. One particularly exciting area is that of slots games. Developers spend many hundreds of hours coming up with themes and different worlds for these. With VR and AR, it will suddenly become possible for slots fans not just to enjoy the themes, but to become a virtual part of them themselves.

While some people may feel that AI heralds the end of civilization, online casino operators are seeing it for the potential game changer it may be for them. It has many potential applications in the iGaming context. For a start, it could allow games to alter to suit the playing preferences of individual players, tailor offers and incentives specifically for them and generally make it a more personalized experience. AI could also help the operators identify if any cheating or other fraudulent practice is being carried out by analyzing huge amounts of data which human operators could easily miss.

In this respect, mobile online casinos are mirroring what has been occurring for some time now in the video gaming world. Instead of having to download games onto devices with finite amounts of available memory, streaming them directly from the cloud provides a much better option for many players. This ties in perfectly to the need for immediacy and partners well with the increase in social gaming as already mentioned. And just as is the case with video game streaming services, this offers the potential to offer a huge number of games. So, where some mobile online casinos currently offer hundreds of slots options, this has the potential to increase this to thousands.

Many people predicted that cryptocurrency would really take off in the online casino sphere. After all, the speed, security and anonymity of transactions would seem to make it an obvious choice. However, the sector has been relatively slow to adopt – although an increasing number of cryptocurrency casinos are now starting to emerge. No doubt more will in the future.

It’s the blockchain technology behind crypto that is really starting to be exploited by operators now. It’s being used to create decentralized gaming platforms that, because of the secure nature of blockchain, can offer true randomness and fair play to their games. The most important thing to see in all these trends is that, taken together, they create a holistic whole, making the overall effect far greater than the sum of its parts. And that has to be very good news indeed for the future of the online casino sector as a whole.