The Bingo Resurgence Means Trouble for Mobile

Over the last few years, Bingo has seen a massive resurgence, partly thanks to the ability to play it online via phone apps.

From experts predicting it was all but dead in the 90s and early 2000s to more than a billion dollars of revenue in 2019/20, Bingo is well and truly back with a bang. That’s good news for fans of the game, but potentially bad news for developers of mobile titles.

When the whales start putting their cash into games that might be able to give some back, the market will feel it.

Money Troubles and Bingo Balls

With something like Bingo, you get what you pay for and, yes, there’s a chance you’ll get some of that money back. You can find offers all the time – like this 888bingo offer – and so you never feel like you’re being shortchanged.

The mobile world is very different. Obviously we’re not talking about Fortnite and the like, which have their own special fans dedicated to supporting them day and night. But the mobile market is made up of a lot of freemium games, and the “mium” part of that is usually not great value.

Sometimes it’s a dollar here or there to get rid of advertising, and I guess I see the sense in that. Developers want to recoup their costs.

On the other hand, we can all name mobile games that take it too far. Skipping time barriers or buffing out your characters – actively making the experience so bad for free players that it’s barely worth playing. And yet there are those that pay a fortune on just that. There doesn’t need to be many, but the ones there are pay hundreds of thousands of dollars as a reward for shady practices.

Now imagine the impact on shady mobile app developers if their biggest spenders realized there was a better alternative.

Future of Gaming

Mobile is the future of casual gaming, and actually there’s evidence that we’re already there. Granted, there are more core gamers than ever too, but kids growing up today feel as comfortable with touch screens as they do with controllers. Think about how unnatural it used to feel to play FPS games that used two – TWO! – analogue sticks, and then imagine that you don’t even use a controller.

The next generation of gamers won’t need a console, they won’t need a controller – they just need a tablet and an internet connection.

And for the most part that probably won’t change much for console gamers. xCloud can exist alongside a traditional gaming ecosystem just fine.

The point is, there are a whole generation of youngsters who are open to the idea of playing on mobile, open to the idea of spending real money on microtransactions… It seems obvious that the likes of Bingo and other online gambling games will find a new life. If that means shady apps with no real value disappear, then we’re all for it.

As the gaming landscape changes, expect to see a surprising amount of whales hitting the virtual bingo halls.