Exciting things are happening in the iGaming industry. While there has been online gambling since the world wide web was invented, in recent years, things have really taken off. iGaming has benefited from technological advances with faster internet access speeds transforming how we play.
In addition, enormous strides have been made with smartphone technology, screen resolution, graphics, and animations. Essentially, everyone who wants one has a mobile casino in their pocket, allowing them to access safe, regulated iGaming sites.
Many states in the US and most of Canada have seen significant changes in gambling regulation in recent years. This means these markets are of enormous interest to international casino companies. Canada is of particular interest because Canadians love to gamble.
A recent survey estimated that there were 19 million active online accounts in the country. In addition, all the provinces are self-governing when it comes to gambling regulation, and Ontario was the first to open a fully regulated, legalized market a little over a year ago.
‘The Founders’ is the title of a book about the original team who set up PayPal. These giants of fintech have also been dubbed the “PayPal mafia’. PayPal is extremely important to the success of eCommerce and digital transactions.
In the early days of the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, PayPal was one of the survivors. Compared to Amazon and Apple, it is a relatively small company. It has a market capitalization of $135 billion compared to Amazon’s $1.6 trillion and Apple’s $2.8 trillion. However, several co-founders, including Max Levchin, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, have become household names.
While the original team did not stay around very long after eBay acquired PayPal, the service they created has been one of the keys to the success of the iGaming industry in Canada. PayPal does not only ensure incredibly secure transactions, but it also facilitates swift payments. Money transferred using PayPal will appear almost instantaneously in the recipient’s bank account.
The speed of transfer is critical in the iGaming industry. Once people have gone online and decided to play, they want to get going as quickly as possible. The same applies to withdrawing money and winnings from your online casino account. At a land-based casino, a player would go to the cashier and exchange their money for casino tokens or chips. The same has to happen at an online casino, but the ‘chips’ are deposited in a digital wallet at the casino. How those are paid affects the speed at which you can start playing and the speed at which your winnings will be paid out.
Plenty of online casinos reviewed at casinoscanada.com offer instant withdrawals for players. The instant withdrawal is from your digital casino account. The speed at which the money will be returned to you depends on the payment method used to make the original deposit.
For example, deposits made using Mastercard, Visa and Interac can take around five days. However, users who made a deposit using PayPal can expect to receive their funds back within twenty-four hours and frequently much faster than this.
Online casinos are increasingly accessible as cloud-based gaming means that we no longer have to worry about not having enough space to download our favourite games. Instead, we can stream the action directly to our phones with a decent, stable internet connection.
One of the recent genuinely remarkable breakthroughs in iGaming are live dealer casinos. Playing your favourite games no longer means participating in a simulation. While graphic interpretations and animations are fun, imagine interacting with a real dealer and sitting alongside fellow players without leaving your home.
You do not need to imagine it because live dealer gaming is already accessible at many online casinos across Canada. However, if you haven’t tried this out, it seems borderline magical. A human being deals cards in real time to you and fellow players; you play your hand on your device, and the dealer and other players interact based on what you have played.
These games are shot and created in specialist studios in various locations worldwide, meaning you can find one open any time of the day or night. The founding software providers leading the iGaming industry in live dealer gaming come from Europe, and the big names are Playtech, Ezugi and Evolution.
Playtech launched the world’s largest live dealer studio in 2017. Based in Riga, Latvia, it was equipped with special cameras and OCR to broadcast interactive games worldwide. In addition, the facility has hundreds of custom-made studios with tools for dealers and special gaming areas.
OCR allows the computer to translate the cards dealt into data, and the players’ on-screen interactions are then instantly recognized by the gaming software. Playtech’s setup has state-of-the-art monitoring, a control centre, and a training campus. The attention to detail and level of investment is a testament to the potential of this area of iGaming.
The iGaming industry is quick to test and adopt cutting-edge technology and will continue to do so over the coming years. Some online casinos made tentative steps into the metaverse, but this now appears to be more hype than reality. However, intuitive AI and machine learning will probably make the next significant changes in how we pay and play.
