The history of iGaming dates back further than many people today realise. In fact, the first veritable online casinos opened their doors within a year or two of the world wide web going public in the early 90s.
Of course, those earliest interactions had more in common – visually and functionally – to the classic Windows game of Solitaire than the modern offerings, but the seed was planted. Over the intervening several decades the sector presided over an endless succession of minor improvements and innovations that not only impacted the way we access and enjoy real money gaming today, but had an outsize impact on the wider eCommerce sector.
For example, modern payment processing, such as you'd utilise not only on today's casinos but at checkout on major platforms like Walmart and Amazon owe their existence in no small part to the legwork of these iGaming ancestors. After all, for online gaming to take off it required a reliable and secure means of making deposits and withdrawals – and the earliest robust examples of this technology, accordingly, were developed by this market before spreading to the wider world of internet finance.
This speaks to a core truth of the iGaming sector – it likes to stay ahead of the curve, and embrace technological innovations as they arise. To this end, today's sector is already eagerly exploring the potential of a suite of new tech, from virtual reality, to crypto currencies.
But there was one major shift that occurred over the past two decades that has impacted the industry more than any other, and that is the arrival of the smartphone.
A Prevailing Trend
Modern smartphones are incredible devices – in fact, they're the most popular, and best selling single product category in human history. This speaks not just to their appeal, but to their intuitive design. In effect, the smartphone brought computing to the masses, and now 86% of the global population owns at least one of these pocket computers.
That has moved the dial significantly on how digital businesses and brands operate, as their average consumer has pivoted from being a desktop or laptop user, to a smartphone one. Smartphones are coming to increasingly dominate all areas of the modern consumer tech sector. Over the past 10 years, an additional 2 billion users came online through smartphones, and it is estimated a further billion will join them in the next decade.
These are serious numbers, especially when you consider that each of these users becomes a potential consumer for digital brands, such as those belonging to the iGaming industry. At present, 25% of all gaming revenue by way of the casino market comes from online services, and this number is only growing. As such, the future of gaming investment is decidedly aligned with the ongoing smartphone trend.
Access to Dynamic Offers
Smartphones offer unprecedented access to digital services, and they are truly on-demand – given that in most cases, the furthest distance a user now has to travel to access an iGaming platform is to reach into their pocket.
To make the most of this new context, iGaming platforms are increasingly furnishing their users with diverse and compelling sign-up offers and other bonuses. These are accessible through bonus reviews such as www.oddschecker.com/us/casino/borgata and many others. This signals a shift in the way the iGaming sector promotes organic growth. In physical venues, it made little sense to offer a wide array of offers – instead, a one-size-fits-all approach proved more efficient and effective.
This has been flipped on its head when it comes to iGaming, as users are accessing services from around the world. In such a context, having the widest possible selection of offers to explore becomes the optimal route. Ultimately, this saves the end-user time and money – a fact only bolstered when their device of choice is a smartphone.
Future Optimizations
As time goes by, more and more platforms are rebuilding their products to suit the new mobile context. Typically this means two main things – one: ensuring their offerings work well with touch inputs, and two: making it so that their websites and apps render correctly in portrait orientation.
As time goes by, new iGaming titles are being built from the ground up to favor this form-factor, following the growing trend for vertical content such as we see with video thanks to the likes of TikTok and Instagram Reels.
