The Evolution of Mobile Gaming in Casinos
Casino games that were previously restricted to heavy desktop sites, with small side menus and long loading times, began to appear on the phone. A new medium required games to be optimized for short sessions, played while on the move, with patches of poor WiFi connection in between. In terms of design innovation, it was these games, not any flashy promotional images, that made the greatest impact on casino design. A player comparing rules in Bratislava, for example, might test a €1 slot on a phone. The same player might check a list of reviewed zahranicne online casino sites in Slovakia first. It was sensible to enable one-off payments online. The player could open the best local casino online guides using sk for country sorting, then judge the lobby by speed, payment options, and screen clutter.
Thumb-first design changed the lobby
Those early mobile casino pages and sites were essentially shrunk down versions of the full online casino experience. A pretty grid of slots was accompanied by a less-than-convenient cashier process. It wasn’t until around 2012 that online casinos began to treat the phone as the primary device. Games were played in portrait rather than landscape and menus were repositioned to the bottom of the screen. A very useful search function for games appeared with filters for aspects such as volatility, paylines and even the individual game provider (e.g. NetEnt, Play’n GO). The best online casino lobbies of all have one main objective: to pass the time as quickly as possible. The fact that sessions are of shorter duration but are played more frequently than online sessions on desktops means that information such as players’ primary limits (for loss etc.) and conditions for bonuses must be clearly visible on mobiles. Often this information is displayed near the player’s current balance.
Apps gave way to browsers
Most casinos in the past released native apps for their customers to download to their mobile devices. As mentioned before, Apple and Google App Stores have different rules for gambling apps and, even if approved, can be removed at any time. Therefore, most casinos today offer mobile gaming on their website in HTML5. That means all games load up straight into your mobile browser, no download required. Browser updates are much less painful than applications. If there is a bug with a roulette game at 9 am in the morning, by lunch time the fix can have been deployed to all browsers. In contrast, updating an application on an app store can take days or even weeks. However, mobile updates can also make players distrustful. Most websites on mobile are used for short periods of time, and therefore lots of information must be visible to inspire trust, i.e. licenses, encryption etc. Website URLs and payment methods should also be clearly visible.
Live dealers shrank the table
Live games are some of the most challenging games to replicate on mobile, particularly in terms of video quality. Whilst Evolution has done an excellent job of developing mobile-specific games that work well on a range of devices including those with low-specification 4G networks, live games present particular challenges. Live mobile gaming (supporting a live dealer casino) is a further test for the evolution of the mobile games and especially for online casinos. Although big screens have been set up for live gaming in online casinos, online live gaming is increasingly being played on mobile. The cameras of the live mobile games need to have sufficient quality to stream in good quality (e.g. HD). The size of the buttons on the live mobile games needs to be big enough to press with one thumb, and the pay-out history has to fit into a narrow strip on the screen of the mobile device.
Payments became part of the game
Mobile gaming for online casino games pushed the payment methods of the online casinos out of the back office of the casinos. Most online casinos now offer a range of deposit methods that work with Face ID or a fingerprint scanner, saved cards online, online payment methods such as Trustly, or online accounts of banks and giro institutes to make instant deposits. Mobile gamers of online casinos expect to be able to withdraw cash much faster and receive a push notification when their withdrawal has been approved and sent to them. A withdrawal from a casino online that is left to “process” for 48 hours or more is seen to be old and out of touch. Online users are used to tracking parcels, ordering pizza, hiring a taxi and following sports events online in real time and therefore expect to be able to track their withdrawal from their online casino account too.
What the next screen suggests
Personalization with the protection of boundaries is the next trend that goes further than virtual reality. Casinos already have the possibility of saving players’ preferences of e.g. playing with €0.20 per spin in portrait mode with slot games and paying with their debit and credit cards. However, regulators in the UK, in Sweden and in the Netherlands are very strict about very pushy after-loss messages. They will contain recommendations of recently played games, an up-to-date view of bonus money on the account and, on the same page as the payment method, ways to set limits for the player. A useful test for a mobile casino would be to see if the home page is clear enough to be viewed on a busy train.
