In January 2019, it was reported by BBC that the video game industry in the UK was worth a massive £3.86 billion, being worth more than the UK’s music and video industries combined. However, it’s another form of digital gaming that comes out on top in the UK.
In a most recent report from the UKGC, iGaming was found to have a total gross gambling yield of £5.3 billion from April 2018 to March 2019, marking it as one of the nation’s largest entertainment sectors. The remote/online sector of the gambling industry, known as iGaming, has become a colossus of UK entertainment; but how did it become so popular?
Mobile Penetration is Key
Even though China, India, the United States, and even Brazil boast more smartphone users than the UK, the little island in Europe has the largest percentage of smartphone users per population count out of all the top ten countries, for the number of smartphone users.
It was found that 82.9 percent of the UK uses smartphones, per https://newzoo.com/insights/, with the country boasting a much higher mobile penetration rate than China (59.9 percent) and the USA (79.1 percent).
People all over the UK have access to the internet and all that it has to offer through their smartphone browsers and mobile apps. One of the fundamental reasons behind the rise of iGaming has been the industry’s leading names identifying the mobile trends early, and then introducing mobile offerings of their own.
Utilising the accessibility of mobile phones was key, especially in a nation where casinos aren’t present in every town or nearby city. Becoming compatible with mobile devices ensures that anyone could play an online gambling game whenever they want to, thus increasing the player base.
The Importance of Accessibility
The occasion of going to a casino for a night out isn’t overly encouraged in the UK in the way that it is in places like the USA, with Las Vegas and Atlantic City, or in Macau in China. With any plans to build a huge gambling-centric venue being quashed earlier in the millennium, as shown by https://www.theguardian.com/politics/. Now, land-based casinos are held to a maximum machine jackpot of £10,000, and casinos are limited to 150 slot machines if they’re large and 80 if they’re deemed to be smaller venues.
You only have to look as far as sites like https://games.paddypower.com/c/daily-jackpots, for example, to see that someone can win more than the land-based jackpot limits every day online, with the Daily Jackpot averaging at around a £40,000 drop. It can also be seen that the online offering is far more varied than that of brick-and-mortar venues, with many more than 150 slots on top of classic casino games like roulette and blackjack.
When an iGaming platform is offering a jackpot that drops every day – which is invariably greater than the biggest possible machine jackpot in a land-based casino –you can see why some people are attracted to this online sector for their gambling entertainment. The wider range of slot games is just further icing on the cake.
Considering how much bigger the experience of gambling is online, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that iGaming has become one of the entertainment titans of the UK.
