There’s no question whether Covid-19 affected every type of industry, may it be positively or negatively. The gambling industry suffered both wins and losses in this battle, but it had not remained unaltered.
In the UK, Public Health England conducted a series of research to come up with a report showing the impact of the pandemic on gambling, starting from 1 January 2020 to 1 October 2020. Shortly after the UK lockdown began, the gambling news UK reported that land-based casinos would close, along with betting shops, bingo halls, arcades, and live racing venues. However, all UK casino sites would remain open, and other types of online gambling would still be possible.
While the fact that UK casino sites would remain available was good news for gambling enthusiasts, the officials worried that players who had no experience with online casinos would not know that there also are online casinos rigged UK. Thus, they would not know how to find the most trusted casino online UK and look for reliable licenses before starting to play at online casinos, and so they would put themselves at risk. Moreover, Members of the Parliament were concerned that closing the land-based venues would lead to a permanent shift to online gambling for many players, which could be more harmful.
The report does not come with new results on the matter, but it does show that online gambling did indeed increase in popularity, with both gamblers and people who have never played before starting to entertain themselves at online casinos.
This happened worldwide, with frequent gamblers turning to online casinos because they could not go to physical ones and regular people taking up gambling for various reasons. 34% of them started to gamble because of simple boredom, 28% started doing it because of financial pressure, 25% did it because they needed to relax, and 16% did it when there were online social occasions.
While offline gamblers became almost inexistent, online gamblers became much more numerous. Before the global pandemic, the percentage of people in the UK who used to go to physical casinos reached 5.97%, while after the pandemic, it decreased to 0.22%. On the other hand, the percentage of online gamblers reached the number of 16.93% before the pandemic, and this number went up to 21.16% after Covid-19.
During the pandemic, 23% of people in the world spent longer than one hour playing casino games, leading to the online gambling industry growth. While land-based casinos lost a lot of money, with the region of Macao dropping its revenue by 93.2%, Nevada by 53.38%, and Las Vegas by 39.57%, only to name a few, online casinos started to flourish.
In 2019, online gambling registered at 62%, and in 2020 it increased to 78%. During the pandemic, 30% of gambling enthusiasts signed up for a new online casino, and 5% of them did it for the first time. This was great news for all casino operators and casino games providers, as they managed not only to make offline players check out their products but also attract more people to gambling too.
As the iGaming industry became more and more popular, many online casinos started to improve their casino services, add up more casino games to their collections and bring more profitable bonus offers as the numbers of players increased.
It’s good news that the pandemic turned out to be something good at least for the iGaming industry and for the players who discovered a new way of having fun with their hobby, but only as long as they play just at legal, trustworthy casinos and gamble responsibly.