Why Mobile Gaming Grew Faster Than Online
Source: Casino Journal The online casino world grew at a pretty incredible rate. So fast, in fact, that it all but exceeded everyone’s expectations. If looking at a chart of the growth, it went from about twenty billion in 2009, to roughly forty seven billion in 2017. That number is predicted to reach roughly sixty billion by 2020. Now, I’m not much of a business-oriented person, but the number sixty billion sounds like something to be impressed by. That is, until you have a little gander at what mobile has done. Mobile gaming is worth about forty one billion. But that’s less than other online gaming, I hear you say. So it is. This difference is that mobile gaming came significantly later than other online gaming, which means that it has grown at a rate significantly faster. But maybe significantly is the wrong word. Exponentially might be the right word. The question is, why have these two markets seen such an enormous difference in their rate of growth?
Market Establishment
The first aspect to take into consideration is the establishment of the market. Online casino games have been around for a very long time. In fact, online casinos have been around about as long as the Internet itself. At least to some degree. Of course, the first online casinos were laughably simplistic and clumsy by today’s standards. So much so that many were not interested, since they did not have the computer science degree required to make it work. As such, online casinos did not even really feature as a blip on the radar in the early years of Internet connectivity. But notably, as Internet technology advanced, so too did the popularity of online casinos. The faster and more reliable the internet became, the more users began to discover that not only did online casinos work, that they were a great deal more convenient than traditional real world casinos. By 2003 the global online casino market was worth about seven billion dollars. In terms of global markets, this is fairly small. Yes, it sounds big, but when taking online casinos across the world into account, it works out to a pretty paltry sum per region. The point is, however, that the market was thoroughly established by the time mobile casinos even became a thing. And it was established over a period of about two and a half decades. Pay a visit to Ruby Fortune Mobile Casino for a chance to get your hands on incredible winnings. Games like mobile slots, roulette, blackjack and baccarat brought to you by software studio Microgaming are your ticket to the big time.
Riding An Established Market
With online casinos firmly established, mobile casinos emerged in earnest during 2009. Casino users were used to going online to play casino games. And, for all means and purposes, mobile casinos were nothing more than an extension of that already existing market. As such, the adoption rate was all but instantaneous, with users simply continuing their online casino game playing habits on their mobile devices. To put it into perspective, the mobile gaming revenue in China grew from nothing in 2008, to about four billion USD in 2014, to about thirteen billion in 2018. That’s the sort of growth that can make a person throw their hands up and gasp. And, if you’re thinking that the revenue is being stolen from the online market, that’s the most staggering thing of all. The online market has continued to grow in parallel to the mobile market.
Future Growth
Both the online and mobile casino gaming markets continue to grow. Global revenue is expected to hit eighty million in the next few years, and will grow even beyond that. Is there no end to this mad growth? Well, given that Africa is still a largely untapped market at present, with online and mobile gaming expected to penetrate Africa over the next decade or so, much growth of a huge amount is still expected to happen. But, as with all new markets, this growth will reach a plateau at some point in the future. When this will be remains to be seen, but in the meantime, online and mobile casino gaming is a rapidly increasing market. If anything, it seems as if the numbers will be ticking over some time yet, which could soon make online casino gaming the biggest entertainment industry in the world.