Every generation has its own unique traits that marketers try to embed into their marketing efforts, and it seems the casino industry in particular is struggling with selling gambling to generation Z. In this article brought in cooperation with LiveCasinoComparer.com we’ll take a look at the specific challenges that these marketers are facing when trying to get young people, including gamers, to go ahead and gamble for real money.
It might just be that gambling for real money is obsolete, and that casinos as we know them are nearing the exit door, to make room for something new.
Statistics are showing a decline in young player numbers on a yearly basis, which means the young generation of today is gambling less than the younger generation that came before. The casino industry is therefore in a state of controlled panic, as the trend shows there will likely be a decline in overall player numbers after years of growth.
Why is this so?
The marketers of today are finding it difficult to understand the young generation as they themselves are embedded in the existing ecosystem that is based on completely different grounds.
First and foremost, the older generations are not against the idea of gambling some money in an attempt to win some more. There are professional gamblers who gamble for a living, there are casual gamblers, there are gambling addicts who represent the dark side of gambling, and there is mainstream gambling that usually involves playing progressive jackpot slots, bingo, or live dealer game shows with jackpots.
However, the idea of surrendering your fate to an outcome of a random event doesn’t seem to have any traction with the generation Z. Growing up surrounded by data and technology, this generation doesn’t find any appeal in uncertainty. It is the skill games that young people of today want to play, and in the casino sector there are very few of those.
A recent attempt at creating the best VR game on the planet, a hybrid of a slot game and a live game show, failed miserably. Gonzo’s Treasure Hunt VR by Evolution is seeing less than 100 players per hour and isn’t among the most popular live game shows, not even close.
Skill-based casino games
Blackjack is an arhaic game that does take a certain skill but is essentially a boring, grinding game. The live dealer casino sector has a few games that take skill to play properly, and where player’s decisions matter. The most notable of those would be Deal or No Deal. That game allows for some cunning strategies and is perhaps even exploitable. However, it seems the young generation didn’t yet discover this game fully despite some fun TikTok and YouTube shorts with humongous wins.
What would be the perfect gen Z game?
The perfect generation Z casino game would probably involve a social aspect of some sort, as in playing with friends or/and being able to brag about the big win on social media. Also, the game would be fast-paced, simple yet complex in the background, and would be gamified to a large degree.
Crash games come to mind, as they check all the boxes above. Especially those crash games that don’t accept real money bets, but instead let you gamble in-game coins for skins.
As far as live dealer casino games are concerned – and live casino is the most vibrant sector of online gambling – the aforementioned Deal or No Deal sounds appealing. If we’ll take a look at the most popular live game shows right now, there’s only one answer: money wheel games.
Crazy Time, Funky Time, Adventures Beyond Wonderland and Monopoly Live are seeing huge player numbers that are rising every month, so it might just be that these games are unintentionally appealing to generation Z as well as to the older players.
The future
Every generation so far seems to have had its main casino thing. Just look at the online poker frenzy in 2000s and early 2010s, when a lot of Millenials joined the vibrant game that let you become a celebrity and a millionaire from your bedroom. Before them, generation X witnessed the emergence of online slots, and many of these people, now 40-55, now play online slots, particularly progressive jackpot slots, though still having a soft spot for slower games such as blackjack, which is what they inherited from Baby Boomers.
Millenials and generation Z have, so far, forced the online casino industry to rapidly embrace mobile gaming, and now all games, new and old alike, are at least mobile-friendly if not designed with a mobile-first approach. Most casinos abandoned Flash and are using HTML5 as their main technology. Customer support is super helfpul and fast, withdrawals are instant, and customer satisfaction is the top priority.
However, the main casino game for generation Z is still absent. VR wasn’t the answer, and neither were any of the traditional casino games, including the innovative live dealer games. Perhaps there is a whole different way to gamble emerging, with casinos in metaverse being the answer, a trend that was started by Vinewood Casino, (that later evolved to Diamond Casino) in GTA5.
It is possible that the next big thing in gambling will be embedding gambling into metaverse, possibly with crypto involved in some way, and it might be disguised as harmless in-game coin gambling.
