New Online Gambling Trends of 2019

One of the industries consistently at the forefront when in adopting cutting-edge technology is gambling and around 25 years since the first online casino debuted, there is little to suggest that the innovation will be slowing down anytime soon.

Recent years have seen online casinos welcome breakthroughs in fiber optic connections, allowing for faster, slicker games than ever before; the mobile phone as a pocked-sized alternate device upon which to play casino games; and video transfer online, allowing for the ever-popular live casino offerings widely enjoyed today.

So, what does 2019 hold for the casino industry? What is the must-have tech that’s going to guarantee maximum player enjoyment? Here the biggest trends we reckon are going to shake up online gambling during the rest of the year.

More Live Table Games

As mentioned, people love live casino games. We’re therefore expecting the number of operators offering them, as well as the variety of games carried to increase during 2019.

Developers like Net Ent, Evolution, and MediaLive are all known to be working on improvements to their live games’ UIs, the list of games supported by the live format, and are even working on offering them in additional languages. We expect to see some of these new products come to market before the year is out.

3D Slots

The use of 3D graphics, the kind featured in video games for years now, has been creeping into more and more slots recently and we expect this trend to continue throughout 2019. Gone are the days where a simple digital representation of a fruit machine was enough to lure a customer in.

These days slot designers incorporate all kinds of elements from the world of video games and the use of slick computer-generated imagery is just one of them. Titles are brought to life with compelling cutscenes, stunning reel animations, and intricate spin dynamics.

We’re thinking that almost every traditional online video slot released this year is going to feature such graphics and can’t wait to see what the likes of Playtech, NetEnt, and others have come up with.

Wider Acceptance of Cryptocurrency

Just like with the internet, gambling  was one of the first industries to embrace the revolutionary cryptocurrency payment technology that started with Bitcoin. We’ve already seen loads of casinos start to accept the alternative currency. In the years following Bitcoin’s creation, a huge number of designated Bitcoin casinos sprang up. However, in 2016, NetBet became the first UK licensed casino to take deposits in Bitcoin – one of few big names to do so.

We’re expecting to see two major trends involving cryptocurrency with regards payments in the gambling industry during 2019. With Bitcoin and other digital assets going more mainstream each year, it seems likely that other big-name online casinos will follow NetBet’s lead in accepting digital asset payments.

We’re also expecting to see loads of different cryptocurrencies accepted at welcoming venues, such as Litecoin, XRP, DASH, Ether, Monero, and Binance Coin.

Anonymous Casinos

Linked with the idea of the cryptocurrency casino is the anonymous casino. Since they do not rely on any central authority to issue or verify transactions, cryptocurrencies can be used without having to enter any of your personal information.

Unlike bank payments, there is literally no one stopping you sending money to whoever you want. There is also the option of playing with a no deposit bonus. These are available at hundreds of casinos.

However, not all digital assets are suitable for use with anonymous casinos. Bitcoin, for example, uses a public ledger that records every transaction. Although a degree of pseudonymity is possible with such currencies, they are far from the best at protecting one’s identity and blockchain analysis firms are getting pretty good at putting names to wallet addresses.

Other cryptocurrencies can be used with a high level of anonymity, however. Projects like Monero, Verge, and Zcash are tailored to those wanting to transact anonymously and have the potential to open online gambling up to markets where the activity is typically banned.

We’re expecting to see more casino operators attempt to tap into these markets using anonymity-preserving digital assets, TOR routing, and other privacy-enhancing techniques during 2019. Prepare to hear about a lot more no registration casinos in the near future.

Virtual and Augmented Reality Games

Of course, when it comes to any kind of video gaming, online casinos included, all eyes are on virtual and augmented reality technology. Virtual and augmented reality gaming promises to take up where the live casino left off – bringing more life-like experiences than ever to punters.

It’s still early days for the tech, however, and there is still the issue of needing specialist hardware causing a barrier to entry to AR and VR iGaming.

It’s going to be up to the developers themselves to make the apps that drive sales of headsets and other devices. We expect many of the biggest industry names to come out with announcements of products aiming to do just that during 2019 too.

Blockchain Casinos

Not only can we expect the numbers of cryptocurrency casinos to increase in 2019 but we expect more online casinos build games directly using Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology.

Thanks to the immense resistance to censorship a properly secured blockchain can offer, game data stored on a blockchain ledger can be deemed as absolute truth and thus the titles are considered “provably fair”.

Although this little round up of hot online casino trends of 2019 is much too short to do a deep dive into the mechanics of this concept, you can think of it like being able to check that each card that is supposed to be in a deck is indeed present i.e. prove that the game is indeed fair.

The last few years have seen many casino projects raise funds for blockchain-based casinos by selling tokens to be used at soon-to-be-completed blockchain iGaming platforms.

These so-called ICO projects have been developing their products since and we’re expecting many of them to come to market and deliver on their white paper goals soon. Blockchain iGaming could well be a massive trend in 2019.

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