The recent pandemic has led to a surge in traffic for online casinos as players look for ways to stay busy whilst at home before returning to work, but now as things are starting to get back to normal, we’re starting to see the impacts of these changes as growth begins to slow and online casino usage is seemingly starting to steady out.
Credit card ban – Of the changes made, one of the biggest has been a credit card ban for online betting and gambling – aimed at reducing participation options for problem players and reducing the chance that a player can enter big debt limits through their credit card, the ban had been put in place during April. The immediate impact had hurt some operators, but it’s also difficult to tell whether this sole change made a difference or the combination of many changes at once.
The Gamstop Initiative – Another recent change was the mandatory implementation of Gamstop for all operators, if operators choose not to register to the scheme they could be at risk of losing their gaming license – the scheme is a self inclusion initiative for players if they’d like to remove options for the services in which they can play on, but many operators are choosing to register elsewhere to avoid these as this list at Maximum Casinos shows just how many services are available not on gamstop.
A block on advertising – Amongst the changes had also been a short term restriction of advertising for online gambling services – other countries had different methods for the same desired effect such as a restriction on deposit limits as such, but one that had been chosen was from May through June to block all TV and radio advertisement for these services in a bid to curb the growing surge of players.
A return for sports betting – As sporting events have got underway once again, we’ve seen a big return for sports betting – but as a direct competitor of online casinos, it has certainly had an impact on users. Online casinos were able to benefit from the cancellation of many sporting events, but the tables have also turned the other way as major events have returned.
Despite these changes that have had an impact in the past few weeks, online casinos did go through a spell of great success as there had been fears that it would lead to a pandemic of online gambling with more and more users turning to these services, but also as more operators decide to open new online casinos too. It’ll take some time for the figures to show an accurate representation of what had happened over the past few months, but early signs show a very steep increase in players followed but a small dip but numbers remaining higher than prior to the coronavirus lockdown measures – it has also been suggested that many new players are likely to be retained during this period of time, spurring yet more growth in an already flourishing market.
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