Addressing the Popularity of Offline Gambling – Can it be Sustained?

Posted by Harry Kane on Tuesday, July 9, 2024

While there’s always a focus on the iGaming market, the combined on and offline gambling sector in the UK is expected to be worth £15 billion by 2025. Interestingly, brick-and-mortar sites will account for the majority of this yield, while offline casinos continue to expand nationwide.

Of course, players can choose between on and offline casinos in the UK, with both segments of the market overseen by the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC). But what are the key developments defining offline gambling, and how are they continuing to thrive in an increasingly digital landscape?

Are Land-Based Casinos Benefitting from Revenge Travel?

While you may not have heard of the concept of revenge travel, this is something that continues to impact positively on the offline gambling market. Revenge travelling is the idea of making up for lost time and experiences during the coronavirus pandemic, when land-based casinos throughout the world were closed to the public for extended periods of time.

This trend is especially prevalent among UK gamblers, who regularly frequented offline casinos prior to the pandemic. In the 12 months ending March 2019, for example, the total GGY for land-based casinos in the UK was £1.1 billion. However, around one third of regular bettors stopped wagering completely during the first lockdown, costing operators hundreds and thousands in revenue.

Ever since the coronavirus has become endemic and lockdowns have been curtailed, attendance and spending numbers have started to recover and eventually supersede pre-pandemic levels. Players are certainly relishing being able to frequent brick-and-mortar casinos once again, fuelling an industry vertical that has previously been written off.

Leveraging the Social Element of Land-Based Casinos

If we are witnessing a rising trend for revenge travel in the offline casino industry, this is being driven by the underlying social element. After all, notwithstanding the incredible evolution of iGaming platforms and gameplay, successfully replicating corporeal social interactions remains the only experiential element missing online.

Sure, the integration of interactive live dealers has created a more authentic table game experience online. The emergence of VR and AR has also created new opportunities for recreating a brick-and-mortar casino experience, and there’s no doubt that the boundaries between on and offline gaming are now more blurred than ever before.

However, it’s impossible for technology to fully replace or replicate social interactions, especially those that occur organically and in-person. One of the main attractions of land-based establishments is meeting others and interacting with fellow players, which helps to create a unique and immersive experience every time you visit.

At the same time, casinos will usually be constructed as part of a wider entertainment complex, creating close proximity to bars, restaurants and hotels. Even smaller scale casinos will usually be built on central areas with high traffic, so they’ll typically be close to popular eateries and similarly recreational establishments.

In many ways, this remains the final frontier for online casinos, especially if they want to dominate the casino market and render offline betting a thing of the past. However, it’s hard to imagine how iGaming platforms can fully replicate the type of social interactions enjoyed at brick-and-mortar casinos, although future technological advancements could change this.

What Will the Future Market Look Like?

Currently, the iGaming and remote betting market accounts for a little over 40% of the total gambling industry in the UK. This percentage and market share has increased incrementally since the passing of the Gambling Act in 2005, while there’s nothing to suggest that this trend will abate any time soon.

The question that remains, of course, is whether it will begin to slow in the coming years? We’d certainly expect this to be the case, especially given the desire for social interactions at casinos and the difficult that iGaming platforms have when trying to replicate this. There remains a core group of older players who prefer offline gambling too, while younger demographics also enjoy the type of social experiences available at a brick-and-mortar establishment.

It’s also younger players who are driving trends like revenge travel, so we’re likely to see offline casino gambling remain popular in the near and medium term. However, there’s no doubt that the rate of growth the land-based casino market is relatively slow and restricted by a clear ceiling, which simply doesn’t in the iGaming vertical.

Similarly, online casinos are incredibly innovative and can rely on further technical advancements in the future. These include the further sophistication of VR and AR technologies, which can unlock increasingly immersive and authentic online experiences. As such technological trends evolve and take hold, online casinos will begin to look and feel increasingly like their offline alternatives.

For example, we’re already seeing casinos leverage multiple camera angles to provide a fully immersive betting experience and 360-degree views of the floor. Players can also adjust their avatars at the time of writing, while this capability will also evolve given the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). The compilation and analyse of player datasets can also better replicate games like poker online, making it much easier to bluff and read tells when playing competitively.

It has also been argued that live dealer technology can also be improved, especially as more elements of the iGaming experience are transformed by virtual and augmented technologies. This will have a significant bearing on the social interactions between players and dealers online, and this will be an interesting space to watch in the future.

Then there’s the ongoing demographic evolution. There are now generations of younger players who wager exclusively online, while some will have never experienced a corporeal offline gambling experience. This trend will grow stronger and more prevalent over time, particularly as technology evolves and online social interactions become increasingly authentic.