One of the big winners throughout the year where many have been struggling to deal with the ongoing pandemic has been within the online casino industry – attitudes toward gaming as a whole have been changing with the growth of mobile gaming, and a changing demographic have become attracted to a growing gaming market with online casinos often being in the middle of this being able to cater toward many different audiences, and with many features being implemented in different forms of gaming, there are a lot of eyes on the many changes that have been occurring in the industry in a relatively short period of time – it can be difficult to keep up with the changes in restrictions and whether or not they’re ironclad, but many operators have been able to react to restriction changes in a very positive way.
The biggest change and restriction came to the UK market with the Gamstop initiative – the self-inclusion scheme was launched a couple of years ago aimed at providing a space for problem players to self-exclude themselves from the growing number of gambling services appearing, but it had held some unintended issues too as material had been sent to players who were self-excluding, and it had impacted players not signed up too. Operators were able to quickly react to this as a number of sites not on Gamstop started to appear as here you can find some of the biggest, but other changes could start to impact these changes moving forward as other countries may start to get onboard with launching their own similar platforms.
(Image from netconnected.co.uk)
Another big change to the UK came in the form of how online gambling and betting could take place as a ban on all credit card deposits was issued during the middle of the year – whilst many online services have moved in to allowing other forms of deposit such as crypto and prepaid cards, credit card still remained one of the more popular approaches and the ban would change how many punters would have to approach these services – little information has been given around the effectiveness of this approach but the coming months will start to paint a clearer picture on how big of an impact this restriction has had, and for others looking to slow the growth of online gambling this may certainly be an option chosen by many if successful.
Many of the restrictions put in place have been done so as online gambling has found a surge of players throughout the year and has been deemed a pandemic in itself, but it may be difficult to pull any reliable figures from this year itself as many would be inflated through increasing player numbers and extended periods of time where players have more free time – the restrictions placed throughout this year will gain a clearer picture next year, and with many countries throughout this year putting temporary restrictions in place, we may start to see many more of these become more permanent in an effort to slow the growth of these online services Free Gambling Games.
