Improving Mobile Gambling

On paper, mobile casinos, and mobile gambling in general, sound like the best idea ever! I mean, the premise of online casino is that you’re no longer restricted to just one location when you want to get some gambling done, you can do it wherever you want, whenever you want! Unfortunately, the reality isn’t quite the same as the fantasy that advertisements are selling (in fairness, it never is), and while it’s true that you can play whenever you want, the “wherever” part should be rephrased to “wherever there’s a computer”, which kind of limits your options. If you want to play a slot or a hand of blackjack for real money while waiting for the bus, well, too bad, you’re all out of luck! However, with the advent of mobile casinos, suddenly the original promise is starting to ring more true! I mean, you’re carrying around a phone with you at all times anyway, and many of us are carrying tablets, too. I know I’m definitely lost without my Android (gotta check my myriad of idle games every 5 minutes, after all), and I do admit that I’ve sometimes indulged in a little public gambling. Why not more, you ask? Well, as awesome of a concept as mobile casino is, in reality it’s plagued by several really serious problems whose elimination will vastly improve the overall mobile gambling experience. Problems like:

1. The Games Are Too Data-Intensive

The thing is, mobile gambling requires a constant Internet connection, which you can obtain in one of two ways. You can connect to Wi-Fi, which, once again, restricts where you can be in order to play (and unless you’re planning on gambling at a café or whatever, most places with wi-fi, such as your home, already have a computer). The infinitely better option involves having a data plan for your phone and tablet. That allows you to access the Internet literally anywhere you can get cell reception, which means that the promise of being able to play casino games wherever you want is finally fulfilled! The only problem is that data plans often tend to be very limited – I, for example, only get 8 GBs of bandwith, and once that’s done, that’s it. And sure, 8 GBs is a whole ton when I’m just playing my mobile games which are already downloaded on my hard drive and only send a miniscule amount of information back and forth, but it’s NOTHING when you’re doing stuff like streaming. For example, if I was watching HD video on Netflix, I’d burn through those 8 GB in an hour or two because I’m downloading a whole bunch of data in a really short amount of time. Online casino games, which are similarly streamed, share a similar problem. I am specifically talking about Android here – on Apple products, you can download the bigger files once and keep them stored on your phone or tablet, thus limiting data usage, but on Android every single time you open up a casino, you download its files. Then you download the files of every single slot you want to play. And then, the next day, you download all of those files AGAIN. That annihilates your data plan! There needs to be a better solution to this, especially for Android users!

2. There’s A Significant Lack of Choice

In online casinos, you’ve got literally hundreds upon hundreds of games to choose from! Slots, blackjack, roulette, live games, scratch cards, baccarat, you name it, it’s all there! Mobile casinos, on the other hand, are a bit more limited… And by a bit, I mean a lot. Even the best online casinos in the UK are providing maybe about 5-10% of their games to mobile customers. And don’t get me wrong, I know exactly why that’s happening – mobile gaming runs on a different platform than online gaming, which means that ANY casino game needs to be completely rebuilt from scratch for both mobile and PC. Games with bigger budgets get mobile ports, the rest remain PC only, and there’s nothing that can be done about that… Which sucks because many of the games that would be PERFECT for mobile (such as scratch tickets) are mostly unavailable! And the worst part is that there’s nothing anyone can do about it because it’s kind of a closed loop. Not a lot of people play mobile casino because there’s not a lot of games on it, but developers don’t develop more games for it because not a lot of people play mobile casino, and not a lot of people play it because there’s not a lot of games on it, rinse and repeat. Not to mention, there’s an even bigger problem…

3. Mobile Casino Hasn’t Evolved Since Its Inception

Online casino is constantly evolving and introducing new features, games and opportunities. Sure, the features don’t always seem obvious immediately, especially to more casual players, but they’re certainly there. Sometimes it’s more obvious features, such as the addition of more games or new options, while other times it’s more under the hood stuff that’s not noticed (like the transition from Flash to HTML5 a few years ago). Mobile casino, on the other hand, hasn’t really changed at all in any meaningful way, and that’s a problem. You’d think that big casino companies would be all over this brand new business model, trying to promote it as the premiere way to play online casino games, but alas – today, the existence of a mobile casino seems to be nothing more than a footnote in an online casino’s history. “Oh, I can play on mobile with the same account? That’s cool, I guess” is what most players think, which is kind of dumb considering just how amazing mobile casino is. We need innovations! We need stuff that can only be done on mobile! We need developers willing to take a big financial risk and seriously push mobile as the best platform available for games such as slots, blackjack and roulette. If that doesn’t happen, though, I’m afraid that mobile casino will simply join the pile of things that had huge potential, but ultimately failed to deliver.