Given that we already spend 65% of our digital lives on our phones, around twice as much as we do on desktop platforms, building for the small screen is a worthwhile endeavor for casino brands, and one that keeps bearing fruit in all sorts of unique ways. But once you’ve played blackjack, won at roulette, and forgotten the rules of poker at an inopportune moment, what’s next?
Here are just a few ways to keep the portable casino experience fresh:
Find a Live Dealer
Live dealers – glamorous humans in front of a webcam, there to deal your poker cards or spin your roulette wheel – are a newish development in mobile casino, serving as a catalyst for social interaction in roulette, blackjack, and baccarat games. Although it seems quite straightforward – you’re linked from your smartphone or tablet to a remote casino location, where you chat with the dealer in real time while playing the game, in fact there’s lots of technology involved in this pursuit, from RFID chips in the cards so that the camera can read them and overlay this info on your screen, to latest-gen livestreaming servers. Casino brands are competing to provide the best live casino experience possible to gamers by offering different variants and options. The bgo roulette arsenal gives players a choice of dealer as well as variants like French and Dual (two-wheel) roulette. The website is offering a 50% matched deposit bonus (up to £50) on midweek live games too.
Live dealers can be found in some other online casinos too. For example, Guts Casino has the usual variety of tables, inclusive of three-card poker and “London” roulette, while Mr Smith Casino has fifteen different live rooms for the more social gamer to join. With live games, players can usually select between male and female croupiers and, in rare cases, choose a dealer according to their time zone and spoken language.
Source: Pixabay.
Play Craps
Craps is something of an anomaly on the internet. Although it’s the 6th most popular game with casino lovers in 2014 with 4% of the vote (64% of the country’s affections are taken up with just two games, slots and blackjack), craps is almost totally absent online, with just a handful of big brands hosting the game. What makes that fact so strange is the fact that craps is very easy to play, needing only a wall and a pair of dice.
Craps is a boisterous, highly social game in which players root for the “shooter” regardless of association. That kind of communal experience is unlikely to translate well to the internet but, as with live roulette above, there’s an untapped opportunity on the internet for craps with real croupiers; it might not be party central but it’s definitely a more “human” experience than the standalone game.
Take up Social Casino
Social casino, a term that describes games hosted on the Facebook API, is one of the major growth areas in the sector. It’s also quite specific in its demographics; 75% of players are female and 75% play on mobile according to SuperData Research. The genre is characterized by the presence of pick-up-and-play slot games, lacking the variety of experiences offered by popular casino brands like bgo, especially as far as card games are concerned.
Source: Pixabay.
Despite the differences, social casino is likely to take cues from its more mainstream variant in future, adopting skill-based experiences (imagine playing a match-three game for cash prizes) and possibly even live dealers too. Ironically, social casinos lack their namesake trait – the “social” part of the name simply refers to Facebook – so the sector is rather more embryonic than the classic experience. In fact, it can be argued that some of the more serious online casino providers provide a more social experience than these ones.
Casino is likely to continue innovating around new ideas in future (make a note to check out virtual and/or augmented reality games in the next few years) with the inexorable growth of mobile encouraging further development on the platform.
Header Picture Source: Pixabay.