The world of iGaming has come to distinguish itself from related sectors due in no small part to its eager adoption of new technologies. Throughout its history, this industry has carved out its own niche in the world of digital entertainment by hewing close to the disruptive benefits of new tech trends.
It can be easy to suppose that the iGaming market has always been in the mature state we see it today, but the reality is far from this. The first online casino to open its doors did so all the way in 1994. This can often be thought to be a period of prehistory for the internet. The world wide web, the protocol that let people surf a public and connected internet only came about in 1993. Suffice to say, iGaming has always been an early-adopter par excellence.
By exploring the benefits and advantages of new tech niches before its rivals, it has managed to expand into new markets and categories with breakneck speed. The story repeats throughout its colorful history.
Online casinos were some of the first online services to prioritize and develop secure payment processors for websites. They also led the charge of embracing faster internet speeds and more powerful computing capacities in the early 00s, ushering in a wave of visually striking entertainment modalities. And they were among the first to recognize the potential benefits and explosive market reach of the nascent smartphone industry, and quickly optimized their services for mobile browsers and apps.
Now, in 2024, the story continues. We live in exciting times for consumer tech, and while the world is only just beginning to grapple with the possibilities of VR and AI, iGaming is once again ahead of the pack.
Post SEO Integrations
The way people use the internet today is changing, for a number of reasons. For much of the modern internet’s history, the dominant way to search and browse online was through search engines like Google. While this remains broadly true today, there are a number of new approaches eating into the dominance of these engines.
For example, more people than ever are choosing to conduct all their web-browsing ‘in-app’ on ecosystems like Meta’s, and on TikTok. That poses a real challenge to conventional sites reliant on high search rankings for continued growth.
Furthermore, the state of SEO today has begun to result in search engines performing at lower efficiency as they seek to wade through the millions of SEO optimized sites to find authentic search results. Into this context, there’s a key trend being taken among diverse industries to take on some of this legwork itself.
In the iGaming sector, this burden is being borne by the rise of dedicated comparison platforms like casinobonusca which collates leading gaming providers together into trustworthy and searchable directories. By funneling search queries for online casinos towards these platforms, there has come about the added benefit of them serving as hotspots for competitive welcome offers, sign-up bonuses and other affiliate promotional offers, thus saving the average patron not only time, but money.
New Modalities
In 2024, there are broadly three key tech trends being explored by iGaming services. The first of these is cryptocurrencies, and the blockchain. Decentralized finance confers some powerful benefits to 21st century casino fans thanks to its greater privacy and security. Bitcoin casinos and the like are increasingly all the rage, and one we can predict that before long, payments with crypto wallets will increasingly come to be offered as standard across the sector.
In addition to new approaches to finance, we have new ideas about how to engage with the products on offer thanks to the rise of VR, the metaverse and so-called ‘spatial computing’. This tech remains in an early stage, despite all the loud pronounces of its imminent take-over. Many VR optimized casinos are already gaining ground, and the notion of a ‘casino metaverse’ seems too natural a fit to pass up. But it’ll still be a few years before VR headsets come down in price enough to make it an essential investment.
Finally we have AI, which is reconfiguring virtually every digital industry out there today. How it will impact casinos is hard to say, but people are already having great success with hiring AI tools as coaches to help them improve their game skills.