mobile slots featureClose your eyes and imagine a land-based casino. What do you see? Chances are you’re picturing roulette wheels and card tables, all staffed by glamorous croupiers. We bet you’re not imagining slot machines! But while slots might not come to everyone’s mind when imagining the classic casino, they’re the undisputed king of the mobile casino, where their spinning reels, jolly themes and flashing wins have become a ubiquitous part of the digital landscape. While for most it goes without question that slot games belong in this top spot, that position isn’t a given, and with new technologies on the rise, is the humble slot threatened?


 

Why Are Slots So Popular?

woman using iphone 4sIf you ask the average player, they’ll likely tell you that their love of slots comes from the thrill of spinning, the high probability of winning and the great variation of games available in the genre. Ask any industry insider, on the other hand, and chances are you’ll be told about how much easier it is to mass-develop games with such a relatively simple mechanism and how the relative small size required to save them as files and run as applications make them perfect for online and mobile use.

Whatever the real reasons for their ubiquity and popularity, they’ve been the staple of the online gambling scene pretty much since its inception, which is why imagining a world they don’t dominate is so tricky.

 

What’s The Competition?

But imagining it is out job, so speculate we must. To best understand how slots might be knocked off the top spot, it’s easiest to look at the upcoming competition derived from new technologies, and right now, that mostly divides into three categories: skill based gambling, social gambling and virtual reality.

Virtual Reality HeadsetAll three of these are with us already in one form or another, but the two which are closest to reaching their full potential are skill based and social gambling. These both appeal to the those who have grown up on diet of video games and Wi-Fi broadband connections, and who are not going to be satisfied with the lonely and random nature of traditional slots. Virtual reality, on the other hand, is a whole new animal which opens up new possibilities for new games types we’ve never even imagined before.

Most likely, the gambling of the future will combine all three of these elements and create a sort of super-game which cherry-picks the best bits of each of them of a thrilling and transcendent gaming experience.

 

Young Players Will Be The Deciders

Young Person With SmartphoneSo what is going to decide whether slots survive at the pinnacle of gambling into the future? Well, the answer is a surprisingly easy yet deceptively complex one: the new generation of casino players. It lays at the feet of younger players coming of gambling age to decide whether they’ll settle for slots, or demand something new of the mobile casinos of the future.

One must bear in mind that this’ll be the generation that was raised on video games and freemium apps, and whose left brain has shrunk by such an extent that they can barely get through saying “attention span” before getting bored. If we’re perfectly honest about it, young players are increasingly likely to find the old model of slots and casino games boring, and seek out thrills in other forms. This, of course, is all yet to be seen!