For the vast majority of the history of casino gaming, there has been one – and only one – way to enjoy table classics from blackjack to roulette. That was by going to a physical casino to play these games. All of this changed, however, in 1994. This was the moment when the first true online casino went online.
Understandably by today’s standards it wasn’t much to look at, with extreme limitations being placed upon it by the internet speeds and computer processing power of the time. It was also a markedly niche enterprise. At this time, the majority of people didn’t even use the internet with any regularity. All of this came together to keep brick-and-mortar gaming the secure and sole focus for casino aficionados.
But slowly and steadily this picture would begin to change. By the time the millennium came about, internet speeds were improving decidedly, the world was ‘online’, and there was abundant capital and interest in developing digital products to be finished at a high quality. Into this situation came the poker boom, a crossover moment in the early 00s that saw online poker players validated as professionals in their own right and their preferred medium accordingly explode in popularity.
This understandably had a knock-on effect for the wider online casino sector, and would set in motion a process that would only gather momentum up to the present day. Then, by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the smartphone had well and truly arrived and promised to once again revolutionize the way people related to the internet and with it, goods and services such as casino gaming and v1interactive that were resident on it.
Diversity and Affordability
Mobile casinos, that is – online casinos readily optimized for smartphones and related devices – have come increasingly to occupy the forefront of modern online casino development in the 2020s. In mobile casinos, the sector has taken the lessons and potential it refined during its halcyon internet days and supercharged them for a truly global market. One key example of this is to be found in the rise and refinement of the casino bonus and other related sign-up offers.
While such promotions are historically part of the casino sector, in the digital landscape where space limitations no longer applied, casinos became able to offer hundreds or even thousands of bespoke bonuses and other competitive deals in a bid to entice and encourage new and returning players to patronize their services. In effect, this means that one can easily find deals to suit niche interests, whether one is a high roller, or interested in playing a specific game such as slots.
This has resulted in the rise of dedicated platforms like VegasSlotsOnline which not only offer their own repertoire of titles, but furnish users with a comprehensive directory of bonuses to related platforms to explore. The smartphone revolution has merely accelerated this process, by increasing the demographic range and thus necessitating a broader selection of bonuses to match.
Huge On-Demand Potential
As explored above, the smartphone has led to a huge increase in the number of prospective patrons available to the sector. Over the past decade, around 2 billion people joined the worldwide digital population by way of smartphones, with a further billion expected to follow suit by the end of the decade.
As smartphones are increasingly positioned at the forefront of the future online economy, it’s essential that growing industries eager to expand into these new markets optimize their products for mobile.
It is for this reason that one will seldom find an online casino today that does not render well or work optimally on a smartphone display. This development focus is even going further, with new games and services increasingly producing experiences optimized for the portrait orientation. In so doing they’re making the trade-off that those accessing these products on more conventional devices with landscape orientations will represent a smaller growth vector than new gamers accustomed to the likes of TikTok and other vertical mobile content.
Finally, the sheer on-demand nature of the mobile paradigm – in which people are at liberty to access whatever content they wish, around the clock and from anywhere on earth, plays perfectly into the hands of a sector that has sought to innovate in the direction of greater accessibility for gamers for over 3 decades.
