Over the last decade, the gaming industry has enjoyed a huge boost and continues to grow in popularity and revenue numbers at an incredible rate. The emergence of mobile and cloud gaming as well as digital advances that have made for faster and more efficient consoles that can connect with servers across the planet.
The digital advances have also paved the way for new innovative forms of entertainment to breach the industry and establish themselves in a busy gaming market. One of the most popular entertainment avenues to emerge in recent years is online casino play. The launch of casino classics such as blackjack, roulette, poker, slots, and baccarat in a convenient, user-friendly, digital device-wide online format has exploded in popularity across the whole planet.
Markets in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa are beginning to form legislative frameworks to regulate online casino activity securely and responsibly within their borders. The pandemic gave online casinos worldwide that legally existed at the time a timely boost and that momentum has continued to the present day. In 2024, the global market size of the online casino industry was measured at US$19.11 billion, which was an increase of just over US$2 billion from the previous year.
These staggering numbers represent the amount of attention online casinos are receiving in the present day, with projections forecasting an increase of 12% in market size by 2030. Popular features such as bonus buy slots as well as the introduction of live casino tables for blackjack and roulette are contributing heavily to the remarkable rise of this online revelation and with more potential to extract, there is no estimating how far the iGaming industry in general can go.
While these numbers are impressive when considering the quick rise of the online casino industry, they trail leading entertainment options considerably. PlayStation has long been a household name ever since the PS1 was released in 1994. Thirty years later, the PlayStation brand boasts a market size of US$32.58 billion, contributing to nearly half of the total console market (US$73.33 billion).
The Next Step for Online Casinos
A lot is being made about the introduction of augmented and virtual reality into online casino play and while that is something to look forward to, a collaboration of a different kind could propel online casinos into the stratosphere. Online casinos have coupled well with developments in technology and software and have exported their products successfully to digital devices such as desktop computers, tablets, smart phones, and even smart watches.
However, up until now, presenting online casinos in the console world has not been fully exploited. There have been games such as Grand Theft Auto that have created their own casinos within their open world game creations. But the logical step for online casinos would be to use the huge PlayStation population to their advantage.
So far, Four Kings Casino & Slots is the only title to launch a casino-style game on PlayStation which is purely dedicated to casino play. Not as a side distraction or feature, but as the main attraction. The game was released in 2015 and showed online casinos what is possible within the PlayStation world. Although not every online casino will have the budget to finance a major console title, there is good reason to believe that we will see online casinos featuring in the PS Store.
With an established presence on other digital devices, the PlayStation collaboration represents the next logical step. Both also share similar DNA strands in the usability and accessibility constructs. The advances of technology and software has vastly expanded the capabilities in the online realm, which has given rise to online multiplayer games on the PS. In the same way online blackjack players sit around a virtual table, PS players are running around the Warzone on Call of Duty, sharing online spaces and experiences.
The concept of gamification is another aspect that both online casinos and PS games revel in. The purchasing of items on a PS game to enhance an avatar bares similarities with making deposits on an online casino. The previously mentioned bonus buy feature is also one of the prime examples of gamification at work in online casinos and presents another argument for the seamless transition of online casinos onto a PS platform.
AR and VR to provide a further boost for online casinos
We brushed past it earlier, but the implementation of AR and VR technology into PS games and online casinos could provide another avenue towards a future collaboration. With potential overlaps in software providers powering the tech in both fields, the introduction of innovative tech could bring the two entities closer together. Overall, it remains to be seen how the online casino industry will develop in the coming years. If it continues on its current trajectory, it might be PlayStation looking to provide the perfect playing platform for online