The very first online casinos to see the light of day were established in 1994, just a few short years after the world wide web – and with it the dawn of the public internet, came about.
As such, the story of online casinos has always been closely tied to the fate of the internet, though in those early years few had the foresight to predict that this niche market would become the single largest sector in the global $438 billion gambling industry.
Yet that is precisely what happened, and this was far from a foregone conclusion. Instead, it was the product of aggressive innovation at the behest of this burgeoning product category.
The earliest online casinos were heavily restricted in their ability to offer a compelling experience due to the technical limitations they had to contend with at the time. From slow connection speeds, to low quality graphics and processing power on early desktops, the sophistication of these first generation online casinos was on a par with the classic Windows solitaire game.
But this would soon change, as with every new tech trend to come along, this sector would eagerly look for ways to integrate it and benefit from it. In always seeking to stay ahead of the curve, online casinos eventually transitioned from being the poor imitation to their brick-and-mortar counterparts, to viable platforms in their own right offering a product that in many cases beat what the physical casinos could offer.
Smartphones
There have been certain tech milestones in the history of online casinos that have led to a surge in growth and development. One key example was with the arrival of broadband internet in the early 00s. This enabled more sophisticated games and visuals to be provided to internet users, vastly increasing the scope and potential of the titles on offer.
Though no single step change could compete with the widespread adoption of the smartphone in the early 2010s. Suddenly the potential market for online casinos was growing by billions, as these devices would soon overtake laptops and PCs to become the world’s most popular computing device.
Now virtually every online casino is optimized for mobile gaming, with many even offering apps developed for leading mobile systems like iOS and Android.
In the smartphone, the sector’s promise of accessible and on-demand gaming has begun to reach its culmination. Players can now access titles on their lunch-break, on the bus, or anywhere else they have their smartphones with them.
Decentralized Marketing
Not all the innovative steps taken by the online casino market were due to novel technological breakthroughs. Some were simply the result of leveraging the advantages of a digital context to give them over their physical forebears.
One area where it became abundantly clear they enjoyed a significant advantage was when it came to offering promotional deals to prospective patrons. The reasons for this are easy to understand. While a physical casino typically offers 2 or 3 special deals that are necessarily designed to attract the broadest demographic of gamers, online casinos have no such restrictions.
That frees them up to offer hundreds or even thousands of unique offers, each pitched to appeal to a slightly different demographic or patron with varied requirements. Today the success of this is evidenced by the rise of dedicated platforms like Bonuses.com focused on furnishing and compiling the best of these deals together in searchable directories. There casino aficionados can easily find competitive sign-up offers, bonuses and a host of other deals with emphasis placed on everything from poker tournaments to free spins on slots.
Virtual Reality
In the 2020s, with the exception of AI, no new tech innovation is creating the kind of buzz that VR is, with highly publicized moves being made by some of the biggest names in tech. One need only look to Facebook’s rebrand to VR-focused Meta, or the launch of Apple’s own Vision Pro mixed reality headset to see that the so-called met averse is just over the horizon.
In light of this, some of the biggest names in online casinos have begun to offer VR-enabled versions of some of their leading games, and a future where people may soon be able to ‘walk’ down a VR Las Vegas strip appears to be just around the corner.Source
