The history of online casino

From land-based to online casino, there is only one step that was quickly taken with the advent of the Internet. Over the last ten years, online casinos have developed to become a driving force in the gaming industry. In this article, Lucky7Bonus traces the history of online casinos from its creation to its explosion today.

The genesis of online casinos

We have to go back to the 1970s to find traces of the ancestors of the online casino with the first gaming software, including an early version of online blackjack. Gambling, on the other hand, seemed utopian until the end of the 1990s. But the development of the Internet network opened up the field of possibilities by making it possible to bring together tens of thousands of users in the same place.

In order to certify the reliability and security of future online casinos, gaming licences have been developed. The Free Trade and Processing Zone Act of the small state of Antigua and Barbuda was one of the pioneers in 1994. It is the founding legislation for online gambling. Subsequently, gambling commissions have spread around the world with the aim of regulating an emerging market.

The best known gaming licence is currently the one issued by the government of Curaçao. Various criteria must be met in order to be eligible for a licence, including the security of data and financial transactions. In 1994, Microgaming, based on the Isle of Man, was one of the first companies to develop online casino software, while in 1998 Planetpoker became the first online poker room.

The democratisation of online casinos

Although there were several hundred online casinos by the end of 1998, the 2000s were to be a turning point in the gambling industry. Licences multiplied, online casinos too, and the stakes generated amounted to several billion dollars very quickly. The stock market launch of several networks such as partygaming or 888 in 2005 will mark the apogee of online casinos. Before experiencing a slight rebound due to the different gambling legislations in Europe and the United States.

After the famous Black Friday in 2011 which sees the closure in the United States of the most famous Pokerstars and Full Tilt poker rooms, the market is in turmoil. It will be necessary to wait for the following years for a new boom in online casinos to take place, driven by new technologies and more particularly mobile applications. The deployment of mobile and tablet gaming and the creation of responsive sites with a web browser version well adapted to the mobile format changed the game. Today, mobile gaming is widespread and is growing day by day.

Obviously, this democratisation has gone hand in hand with certain abuses and one can only advise to first find out about the reputation of the site before starting to create an account or make a financial deposit. This is the purpose of Lucky7Bonus, which directs you to the best casinos to play at.

The explosion on Twitch

The explosion and democratisation of online casinos remains recent, especially in the French-speaking market. The last decade or even the last few years have led to profound transformations. From very basic sites, in a few years we have gone from being very basic to technological gems that are becoming increasingly popular, well served by streamers on the Twitch platform such as Bidule, the French-speaking number 1 in live broadcasting of online casino games.

The global pandemic of 2020 has brought a new boom in the online gaming industry and this has been felt in the Slots category audiences of the number 1 streaming platform Twitch. Bidule, TeufeurS and others have grown exponentially with the number of viewers reaching up to over 10,000 for the No. 1 Bidule. While the future looks bright for the growth of online casino gambling in Europe and around the world, much remains to be done: less than a hundred countries have legalised online gambling internationally.