Let’s talk a little bit about how online casinos make their profits. Trust me, it’s all going to tie together later on, but for now just bear with me and listen to what I have to say, alright? So, there’s basically three types of players that play in online casinos – they’re the same types of players which are often found playing online games and free-to-play mobile titles as well. First and foremost, we’ve got the newbies. The newbies are the most numerous group, by far. They sign up, make their first deposit, play the games, the works. Most decide that this isn’t really for them and move on to other stuff. A select few graduate into the second category, which we’ll call casuals. Casuals love to enjoy the game every once in a while, but they haven’t built their entire lifestyle around it or anything. They maybe deposit once every month or two and play for no more than an hour or two a week, if that. And then there’s the high rollers, the whales, the people who spend an absurdly large amount of money on gambling, the people who have made online casino their profession, in a way.
Now, the thing is… Casual players don’t really bring in that much profit at all. They’re mostly there because A) there’s a chance they could evolve into high rollers, and B) it’s too much work to alienate them with not enough of a reward. But let me tell you, the combined income casinos get from their average everyday players isn’t really that much at all. Their main source of revenue is the constant, continuous stream of new players (which also don’t deposit that much, but are extremely numerous in number) and the high rollers, which may be relatively few in numbers, but pay through the nose to enjoy their hobby all the time (and trust me, for every smart gambler who knows how to game the system there’s at least 3 who are simply suffering from gambling addiction and operate on the pure belief that if they make one more spin the jackpot will be theirs, but that’s an entirely different can of worms). Those are the players online casinos want to keep – the high rollers and the newbies.
But change is coming to the UK gambling scene, and new laws and regulations could change everything. For one, daytime gambling advertisement for online casinos is going to be banned on TV and social media, which is going to undercut the influx of new players significantly. Without advertisement, there’s really no way for most people to get curious about online gambling, other than word of mouth. And from the looks of things, regulations are only going to get tighter in the near future. Does that mean that the newbies will soon be practically nonexistent as a constant source of income for casinos? And if so, what does that mean for us? Well, it means that casinos will need to start making their moneys from the high rollers, and that means converting as many casuals into high rollers as possible. We can see an increase in high-risk high-reward games, entry fees for stuff like live casinos and other changes which would be useful for high roller players. It’s not really the casinos’ fault – they need to make their money somehow, right? If they don’t, they’ll shut down. But in this change forced upon them by the government they could potentially alienate a significant portion of their audience, and that’s a nightmare scenario that we should cross our fingers and hope never comes to pass.