What Awaits Land-Based Casino Houses In Post-Pandemic Future

Covid-19 has shown impressive impact on many markets and businesses, and interestingly, the niche of entertainment has been impacted in a very specific way — while offline businesses struggled and closed their facilities, online businesses started to thrive. This is true for many niches, including gambling, which is a huge, rich, and quickly developing industry.

According to the early lockdown predictions of many experts in the gambling world, everyone who used to gamble at land based casinos would switch to online casinos for the time of lockdown, and afterwards, they will return to their usual gambling patterns. These predictions were made to foresee the trends for the whole industry, and all the relevant sub-niches connected to this industry. And yet, many early predictions proved to be false.

Firstly, despite the “obvious” and “logical” predictions, only a small percent of gamblers switched from offline casinos to online casinos. Secondly, only a comparatively small percent of regular online gamblers started to actually gamble more online; the bigger part of the gambling population reported a slight change in behavior, if any at all. Thirdly, despite predictions, only a small percent of frequently playing gamblers reported increased anxiety or depression due to lockdown combined with more frequent gambling.

As we can already notice, all the major pandemic predictions about the gambling industry proved wrong; can we assume that the rest of the predictions are also unlikely, and the post-pandemic world will take a totally unexpected toll on the land based casinos? Will these facilities enjoy the same popularity among players, taking into consideration all the antivirus measures, and general shift in entertainment trends?

Antivirus Measures

Already today, many land based casinos report decreased interest from their regular visitors because of all the necessary antivirus measures. Land based casinos seemed to be all about fun, communication, festive atmosphere, crowd of fellow players, late night shows, and playing till dawn. However, today all casinos that want to operate in the time of pandemic offer plastic screens all over the place, limited number of people allowed to the room, all surfaces wiped every hour, everyone wearing masks, etc. While these measures are obviously necessary, they mess up the fun, especially considering that the same games are available online — without limited visitors, limited hours, and obligatory masks.

Increased Competition with Online Casinos

At the same time, online casinos seem to leap forward with their services, constantly increasing their lobbies, offering new games, new bonuses and promotions, new technology, new design, new approach — in other words, doing everything possible to lure the visitors in, and keep them playing.

Even without the pandemic situation, many experts were asking themselves whether land based facilities would be able to stand the competition for another decade. But after 2020 has tumbled everything down, online casinos started to demonstrate one benefit after another, from lower house edge and richer game choice, to enhanced availability for the players, thus becoming even more competitive compared to brick and mortar houses.

Moreover, after becoming aware of the advantageous situation they suddenly found themselves in, many online casino operators started to offer additional benefits, to keep the newly arrived gamblers on their platforms. And while even big land based casinos feel insecure about their operations looking forward to the next lockdown, online platforms seem to thrive.

Will Offline Casinos Even Be Viable?

Besides all the advantages and benefits created for online casinos by the global situation, there is one more trend that seems to threaten the viability of traditional land based casinos. This trend is Live Dealer Games, online table games played by the customers of online platforms against real live dealers, by connecting to the high quality streaming from Live Dealer facilities. This gambling concept seems to unite all the benefits of online and offline gambling, because it offers the fun of gambling against a live person, but without the need to travel to a brick and mortar facility, let alone face all the limitations of the pandemic-style gambling.

Final Thoughts

The trends for land based and online casinos seem to show very clearly, and yet, there are numerous blank spots that do not allow to make long term suggestions about the future of the industry in the post-pandemic world. It is totally unclear what priorities will be followed by the customers after the pandemic. What can be said for sure is that every business has to be flexible and accept new approaches, in order to fight out the storm.

Mike Hunter, casinoshunter.com