New audiences - who are they?

Here’s one simple but essential truth: It is easier to adapt to the audience than make them adapt to you. But if you simply follow the current trends, you'll never be a front-runner. The only way to be innovative is to be different, and take risks. The real challenge lies in creating an output that is both relevant and fresh. This is especially true for the online gambling industry as it is always looking for new customers and ways to reach them.

Here’s another undeniable truth: Millennials and Gen Z have grown up with mobile games and are used to a different gaming experience. Their habits have developed playing Hearthstone and Monument Valley - and not slot machines in old Scorsese-esque movies.

This leaves the gaming industry with an important task - adapting the product design of mobile games to the upcoming audiences. We should start viewing the habit of playing mobile games as an ore, waiting to be forged into a profitable and exciting gaming experience.

Gamification - how and why?

In its initial stage gambling industry tried to fit the whole casino experience into tiny smartphones. And it was an undeniably simple and smart solution for an upcoming age. But the simple solutions have one downside - very soon, they start spawning limitless copycats and copycats of copycats, creating a landslide of increasingly diminishing returns.

What the industry should do now is to stop and think about how to change the product design to make it more attractive to new audiences. How to make it more like a Fruit Ninja and less like a slot machine? How to add new features that will make the gaming experience more engaging? It is important to remember that the key to success lies in understanding your audience and what they want. You can only give them what they want and keep them returning for more.

What's up with crypto?

The advent of cryptocurrency has profoundly impacted the industry by providing solutions for a heavily regulated market. However, this has also created new challenges.

Usually, businesses are happy with any deregulation, but in this case, we witnessed the spawning of many subpar casinos with low-quality gaming, leaving users longing for higher standards. Now it’s evident that whoever answers these requests with transparency, better customer experience, and other improvements will lead the game.

Also, with crypto, another essential problem solves itself: Until now, in-game assets functioned only inside one ecosystem. Usually, their economic capacity stopped at the game’s boundaries. Now, with blockchain technology and crypto, we can have one virtual economy for all games. You could win a token in one game, trade it in another, double it in the third game, and so on.

This will lead to developing new cross-platform games where players could use their in-game assets in different games, creating a meta-game of sorts.

Future is here.

The latter might be the most important for finding the best use cases for, say, NFTs, decentralized economy assets, and other wonders that web 3 is preparing for us.

So, what does the future (and the present) hold for the industry? We can expect to see more gamification, more cross-platform games, and more use of the crypto. The industry is adapting to the changing demands of the audience, and technology is evolving to meet those demands.

Is it an exciting time to be part of the changes that are yet to come? - You bet.