Online gambling today is a multibillion dollar game. There are literally tens of thousands of different slot games alone, without considering live casino games, RNG table games, blockchain games and more innovative games that haven’t been thought of yet. That’s a far cry from the first few pixelated card games of the late 70s.
From the first gambling games, to the first online casinos – and all the tech behind them – to the emergence of mobile gambling, live dealers and gambling streamers, these are the innovations that shaped the online gambling business of today.
Secure Online Transactions Were Needed First
The first video slot machine and the first digitized (virtual currency) casino games both debuted in the late 1970s. The Atari 2600 launched in 1977 with Blackjack as one of its nine launch titles. The first video slot machine debuted a year earlier in Las Vegas, with Fortune Coin Co being the first company to digitize previously mechanical reels onto a screen.
Betway bucks are the latest in a long trend of payment innovations in online gambling. This deposit option serves customers who have physical cash and want to use it to play online casinos. Enter betway bucks betting vouchers. Simply pick one up at a store, load it with cash at the till, enter the code in your app and away you go – you can be placing bets online in minutes. All with great odds, and promotions and bonuses too.
Going back a few decades, the very first online casino is up for debate. But one name that is mentioned often is InterCasino. Whoever was first, online casinos would not have been possible without:
- Fast enough internet to handle real time bets
- Random Number Generators to power the games
- Secure online financial transactions capable of handling high volume of deposits and withdrawals
- Advances in the power of home computers and gaming
Once these things were in place, around the late 90s, the scene was set for the incredible rise in popularity of online casinos.
The Smartphone Revolution Opened Up the Market
The next biggest innovation that really changed the game was mobile first operators. For many years, getting on the internet was expensive. You needed all sorts of hardware and some technical know how to even get online, let alone find an online casino. Sure, by the early 2000s online casinos were available in Europe and the US – but much of the world wasn’t online at that time.
The arrival of the smartphone and mobile internet changed all that. Since there are now more mobile phones in the world than people (has been for more than two years) it is inexpensive and easy for people to get online wherever they are. Boom, the biggest barrier to entry for online casinos was broken.
Once the business realized this, mobile-friendly and then eventually mobile-first casinos soon followed. Now any and every casino worth your time has an excellent mobile site, and probably a mobile app. Or two.
Live Dealer Technology Upped the Immersion Game
After the emergence of mobile casino gambling in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the next biggest innovation was definitely live dealer casinos.
Shoutout to big progressive jackpots, which get a lot of publicity for operators and are great for the few lucky players (and all you dreamers). However, they’re not strictly an online casino thing. Neither are slot features like bonus rounds or scatters, so they won’t be covered here either.
Live dealers changed the game for many, as it is a lot easier to trust a live card that you can see being drawn on screen than it is a random number generated virtual cards. Bad beats just don’t feel so aggravating when you can see it is just pure chance.
They also create an immersive casino gambling experience and a human touch that makes them stand apart from virtual table games.
Live Casino Game Shows Up the Production Ante
Evolution was the first big player in this space, although most other developers have also now got in on it some form. After a few years, live casino game shows also exploded in popularity. Evolution was responsible for the first of these, with its Dream Catcher wheel game that debuted in 2017.
Other popular live casino game shows include:
- Candyland Bonanza LIVE
- Monopoly LIVE
- Crazy Time
and at this point literally hundreds more. Developers also recently started adding more elaborate elements to traditional live casino games to up the stakes and excitement or speed of the game, such as with Lightning Roulette or Infinite Blackjack.
So, these have been the key innovations that got online casinos to where they are today. Sure, some big changes have been missed out – this couldn’t be a fully comprehensive article or it would be a book. But it has featured the real key events of the online casino game over the past four decades.
