iGaming Business magazine Mobile Gaming Outlook 2017 | Page 2

Mobile Gaming Outlook 2017
THE MISSING REVOLUTION
OF ETHICS
If gambling is part of the entertainment industry, then where is the true innovation
coming from that can propel the sector into a brave new world of creativity?
By EmEsEs, CCO and iGaming Evangelist, Gamanza Group.
When I started to write this article, my core
plan was to mention the various upcoming
new and ground-breaking technological
achievements and accompanying trends
within the mobile technology sector.
I would then follow that by praising
the steadily growing computational
performance available to igaming
developers, then bringing forth how the
40% threshold in worldwide mobile
igaming players will be surpassed in 2018
and how splendid this all is for the future
expansion of our beloved industry.
Hence, the near certainty that technology
companies will announce new or innovative
products come what may.
So, turning to the iGaming sector and its
current level of innovation, can we truthfully
say that it has both grown and witnessed
similar levels of innovation since the turn
of the millennium?
Or maybe I should ask a different
question: has the player experience really
changed or is it rather the corporate world
that has changed, leaving out the interests
of the players’ emotional worlds entirely?
“Is this industry’s idea of progress still to be taken
seriously when, for example, everyone still calls
‘wilds’ and ‘free spins’ an actual game feature?”
But, didn’t we do this last year already?
And the year before that? And, frankly, every
year that we can remember?
Think about it this way: growth, innovation
and progress are the quintessence of the
evolutional process of technology and
certainly not something to worry about,
as it will always be naturally driven by
the laws of competitiveness and overall
human progress.
When looking at other entertainment
or leisure industries, it becomes hard to
ignore that all of them have sooner or later
experienced a form of industrial liberation
where the introduction of technology has
made the respective industry accessible to
non-corporate organisations and individuals,
paving the way for the independent talents
of tomorrow, securing a constant growth of
tomorrow’s products and markets.
50 | iGamingBusiness | Issue 106 | September/October 2017
AfterEffects and Nuke for the
independent filmmaker; Photoshop and
Corel Draw to the graphics designer
at home; and Logic and Cubase for
the progressive music producer. All of
them have one thing in common: their
introduction caused the liberation of each
respective branch of the entertainment
industry and made production accessible to
all, causing a huge influx in the number of
productions and availability of alternative
and, in many cases, ‘out-of-the-box-thinking’.
So, where and when is this liberation
process to be expected in iGaming?
When will independent game developers
get the chance to showcase their
interpretation of casino games without the
need for huge investments into frameworks
and tools to expand the iGaming industry
palette through individual productions, just
like the rest of the entertainment world?
What has the industry really achieved in
the last 20 years given the general view that
players are happy with simple games rather
than the better-presented and gameplay-
oriented productions of today?
Statements like ‘the older games are a lot
more appealing to players’ and ‘the statistics
prove simple games are more popular’ are
the most widely-used arguments when it
comes to explaining the general quality level
of iGaming products and help explain why
the games don’t display the same level of