As the notorious pandemic locks billions home, leaving them no choice but to shift to online avenues of entertainment, gambling and gaming are eager to reap the benefits. Both industries have been on a steady rise for decades, and now – accelerated by COVID-19 and the new tech – the expansion is going parabolic.
Whether you are a player, a potential investor, or just want to get the hang of these two industries, first of foremost, you should dissect the technological bedrock behind the mind-boggling growth of both. Speaking of which, gambling and gaming have lots in common: both take advantage of blockchain and both reap the benefits of extended realities.
Now that we’ve teased you enough, it’s time to start. One more thing, though: let’s give some credit to Aleksandra Maj, a gambling expert from KasynoHEX, who put this piece together.
Gambling: Live Casino Games, Extended Realities, Blockchain
Evaluated at approximately $75 billion, the global online gambling market is predicted to double by the middle of the decade. More and more countries are jumping on the bandwagon of online gambling, from local online casinos to behemoths like Vulkan Vegas, Slottica, and Energy Casino, providing gamblers with yet unseen opportunities.
Live Casino Games. Since the concept of live casino games came into existence two and a half decades ago, live casino games have learned to recreate real-life experiences with shocking accuracy. A high-quality video stream along with 360-degree cameras, live chat, and customizable on-screen landscape can easily glue you to your smartphone for hours. With no hustle and bustle of traffic, crowded/smoky/noisy halls, and other accompanying problems, you can now get the best the gambling world can offer at the comfort of your home while saving your money and nerves.
Extended realities. The technological step –or some may say leap – following live casino games, extended realities encompass Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality, all three allowing you to either modify/complement the real worth with virtual elements or create a virtual universe from scratch. You can already find all types of classic casino games in VR, including slots, poker, and table/card/wheel games.
Blockchain. Although blockchain is still in the face of pure speculation, online casinos are eager to use the new technology to prove their fairness to customers. Here’s how it works: first, a blockchain-based casino generates a Server Seed (encrypted by the casino and known only to the casino), and then the player generates a User Seed (encrypted by the player and known only to the player); next, the Server Seed and the User Seed are combined to create a Seed Pair used to generate the result of the player’s games. Then, once the gambling session is over or once the user decides to use a new User Seed, the casino allows the user to decrypt the former Server Seed and make sure he was treated fairly.
Both blockchain and extended realities are in their infancy and will therefore be dramatically improved in the years to come – but even now they are unbelievably beneficial to millions of players willing to step up their experience.
Gaming: Blockchain, Cloud Gaming, eSports
Having generated an impressive $21.1 in revenues in 2024, the global online gaming market can boast of over a billion online gamers worldwide and even more online games. Surprisingly, gaming is taking advantage of many of the technologies used by online casinos, the most prominent of which are blockchain and virtual reality.
And while virtual reality works for gamers just the same way it works for gamblers, the application of blockchain is much broader:
First, blockchain allows one to redefine the very system of creation and development of games. Up until now, all games were created and then supported by centralized businesses, but that may change as now the community itself – aka the owners of nodes – can collectively own the product and fund the developers. What’s more, open-source games are excellent for free game dev practice because they allow anyone to copy and modify the code.
Second, blockchain makes the ownership of in-game assets more secure as everything you own can be stored in an encrypted form on a blockchain. In other words, no one but you have access to your items and anything else that belongs to you.
The other strong trends are cloud gaming and eSports. The first makes it possible to launch the most power-demanding games on any device, including smartphones, via renting the required computing power from the cloud, whereas the latter creates a whole new realm of virtual athletes competing for prestige, salaries, and domination.
What’s in the card for the future? No one really knows, but more likely than not, artificial intelligence and extended realities will become commonplace among both gamblers and gamers, and soon we’ll be able to control all on-screen actions via brain signals.
