One of the central tenets of gaming has always been evolution. Tied to hardware potential, each new generation of systems pushes the envelope as developers attempt to see just what the new tech makes possible. Too often this has led to the belief that the best games are always the biggest and most complex, but back in reality, the opposite often proves true. Looking at online slots as a baseline, we want to explore why the future may be more streamlined than gaming industry giants want players to think.
An Eye on Modern Online Slots
Illustrations of contemporary slot markets, like those at https://games.paddypower.com/c/slots, reveal some eye-opening truths about how much games evolve. Here, titles like Bonanza, Pumpkin Patch, and The Vault all leverage technology to offer great looks and engaging gameplay, but they also all share a central design philosophy. This philosophy is that people love these games, at their core, for the streamlined gameplay.
Sure, some slots offer some technical bonus games, but these bonus games are always easy to understand at a glance, without the need for long explanations. According to video game developers and publishers, who push for ever-broader and more complicated systems, this type of gameplay is falling out of favor. Instead of taking them at their words, let’s look at the numbers.
Industry Giants
The online casino industry is built on simple experiences which have offered the same core systems for decades. Sure, the visuals have vastly improved since the late ’90s, but they’re not on the level of AAA video games, because they don’t need to be. So, we’d expect casinos to slow down then, right?
Well, no. According to current reports like the one detailed on https://finance.yahoo.com/news, the online gambling market is expected to follow an 11.49% CAGR over the 2021-2026 period. This is on top of a similar CAGR that has persisted for at least the last ten years. Rather than hitting a plateau as graphics did, casinos keep growing more popular, still far from any visible resting point.
Even back in video games, a look at the most popular titles of all time shows that the most complicated experiences with the highest hardware requirements are rarely the most popular. According to the top ten best-selling games on https://ftw.usatoday.com/lists, the only game that could be considered cutting edge (at the time of release) was GTA5.
Outside of this title, the list is filled with entries like Minecraft, Tetris, and Wii Sports. All of these games are simple, and all of them have outperformed every other game on the market. The obvious conclusion we can draw here is that these video games, as we’ve seen with online casino titles, succeed through gameplay.
While it’s true that people always have an interest in the novelty of new experiences, it’s also undeniable that some titles supersede novelty alone. As demonstrated by online casino games like slots, some experiences are essentially ageless, and that’s a lesson the video game market often seems to overlook.
