Casinos have always been a lucrative business. Las Vegas is a whole city dedicated to the event, and the fact that it exists so successfully means our rush of the chase is still intense today.
However, since online gaming has become reachable to so many people, we are starting to see a change in the world.
Online Gaming – The Frontier
Gaming used to be a solo activity played in arcades or on a shared family console. These games needed a disk or pre-installed software to work. In 1990, games were being sold online for a cheaper price and a smaller content size.
It wasn’t until 2001 that collaborative online gaming took off.
So what does this have to do with casinos?
For any of these systems to work well, they needed a strong payment system and gaming design to draw people in.
Online gambling first launched in 1995, a little later than the other online game categories. But the only games you could play were solo, and the designs weren’t as good as the real thing.
When 2001 came, the online gambling world had only just found its feet. It would take another 5 years before collaborative online gambling took off.
You could play fortune coin, but games like poker weren’t great. You couldn’t see other people’s faces, so the social and tense elements of the game were void.
Covid’s Impact On Gambling
During the pandemic, everyone was locked inside which meant brick-and-mortar casinos had no custom.
During this time new online gaming technology was just emerging – affordable VR sets, large download high graphic consoles, and a new boom in board games.
Although the pandemic was a scary and horrible event in our lives, the gaming industry was doing well.
Everyone was stuck inside with nothing to do but game.
This was particularly true in the UK when the gambling industry increased its overall revenue by 30% during this time. And that’s just gambling, not gaming as a whole.
As more people were playing online, the gaming and gambling industry could survive during a time when many entertainment businesses crashed.
How Online Gambling Has Impacted Society
The impact can easily be broken down into 4 sections – job creation, increased consumerism, taxes, and regulation.
Job Creation
Most brick-and-mortar casinos did not fall during the pandemic. They used their mass amounts of wealth to keep their workers employed and prevent their businesses from collapsing.
This means that in-house workers have not decreased. However, because more and more people are gambling online, you would expect these real-life casinos to flop eventually.
Surprisingly that isn’t the case. Radio is still thriving even though we have TV, and the newspapers are still going even though we can read the content online. Original ideas don’t disappear just because we can consume them in a new format.
Playing in a room full of people where everyone is buzzed on luck and adrenaline is a feeling that cannot be re-created at home.
So in-house employees won’t be losing their jobs to this change.
As the online gambling industry increases, more and more technicians are needed to ensure the online platform can maintain the number of people using it.
The industry also needs more creative designers to produce more games, and they need a strong financial team to ensure payments and taxes are applied correctly.
Before the pandemic happened, the 2019 statistics showed that more than 100,000 people were newly employed by online gambling companies alone. Seeing as we know this industry has boomed since then, the numbers will have dramatically increased.
Increased Consumerism
With anyone stuck inside, cash flow dried up. People weren’t spending money because they had no money to spend. In our capitalistic world, we need people to spend money to keep the cash flow moving through the economy.
Hoarding money prevents others from having it, which eventually means you won’t have any either.
However, the online gambling and gaming world help keep consumerism going. You can pay for online activities and keep yourself entertained, all while helping the economy.
Taxes
Taxes are an important part of the economy too. We need them to help pay for universally needed goods and services – paving roads, healthcare, education, firefighters, the list goes on.
Because the online gambling world has been doing so well, they have been paying more taxes to help the country. Focusing on the UK again, in 2018 around 39% of the country’s taxes were paid by online gambling businesses.
Although the figure moves up and down each year, it continues to shoulder most of the taxation burden.
Regulation
Because of the quick increase in online gambling abilities, regulation has taken a while to form. This is why many people are anxious about playing online, and why many US states made the practice illegal until recently.
The recent change comes from new gambling regulations that match the online world’s issues and demands.
Now the government and the gambling world can work together to create a protected space.
This change wouldn’t have happened without the massive increase in demand and taxation.
Final Thoughts
A lot of online gambling can be attributed to the Covid pandemic. Our need for entertainment can be found even in the darkest places.
