The variety of online casino games depends on the software supplier

The last ten or twenty years have seen a similar pace of technological development to that of the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The massive expansion of the internet coupled with extraordinary developments in mobile technology has not only completely changed our lives, it has spawned new industries and brought about totally new business opportunities. Who would have thought that almost everybody would be carrying a mobile phone, let alone changing it as regularly as we would a fashion item. Providing we have access to a WiFi signal we can now do almost anything we want to do on the internet, even when we’re on the move. Some of the world’s biggest companies were created as a result of the internet and are totally dependent on the internet for their revenues, but that is also true for many smaller companies nowadays and very few retailers for example can survive without an internet presence of some description. The widespread desire for a website to create a brand awareness or sell product directly to customers has led to the creation of specialist internet software companies to design and manage these websites. Every successful online business must have good efficient software to promote the product and service the customer, none more so than our favourite online business an online casino. Clearly the absolute priority for any computer software used to manage a website which has financial dealings with their customers through the site is the financial security and level of data protection provided by the software. However the casino software associated with operating an online casino site is probably more important than for any other type of online business, because the casino software supplier is also responsible for the design of a significant proportion of the actual product on the site. We are referring of course to the huge range of slots games which are now featured on almost every online casino and which are mostly supplied by the casino software company associated with the site. Even the popularity of traditional casino games such as roulette and blackjack can be influenced by the quality of the computer graphics provided by the casino software company. The casino software companies are also usually responsible for negotiating and copyright issues or licensing agreements which may be necessary. Many of the slots games we can access on an online casino site are based on popular films or television programmes, and some also feature well-known cartoon characters, all of which may be the subject of copyright restrictions which the software companies need to resolve.

The earliest online casinos came about when the big bookmakers started to add some casino games to their online sports gambling sites in an attempt to broaden the appeal and attract new customers. We now know that this strategy certainly worked and online casinos have developed very rapidly in a fairly short period of time. To achieve this most of the site operators employed specialist casino software companies to both manage the sites financially and to design many of the casino games. This situation therefore created a brand new internet business opportunity for software specialists and allowed some of them to become very big businesses in their own right. The biggest casino software company of all is Playtech, and since it was founded in 1999 Playtech have quickly grown to become the dominant player in the casino software sector. There is no doubt that this success was primarily due to their licensing agreement with two of the major media and entertainment companies, Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment. This allowed them to theme many of their slots games on some of the most popular films and cartoon characters of the time, and so allowed them to steal a march on their rivals. Playtech is still the most dominant of all the casino software suppliers and is still used by the William Hill, Ladbrokes and Betfred online casinos.

In Ireland of course the nost popular online casino is probably the Paddy Power casino, not a user of Playtech software. Paddy Power made the decision to use the casino software supplied by Wagerworks, another of the software suppliers which were set up to satisfy the requirements of the fledgling online casinos and now well respected in the business. Wagerworks actually started as a subsidiary of the slot machine manufacturer Silicon Gaming, but is now totally independent and focuses solely on their casino software. Paddy Power have gained an advantage by using Wagerworks rather than Playtech because it has enabled them to feature different casino games, although some of these can now also be found at the 888 casino site.

One of the other online casino operators to use casino software from a big international software company is Bwin, and they currently use software supplied by Chartwell. Chartwell is a Canadian company which supplies casino software to almost every regulated gambling market in the world, and is very much a major player in the online gambling sector.

Over the last couple of years we have seen much needed new blood come to the online casino market, with the introduction of a variety of specialist online casinos dedicated solely to supplying interesting casino games rather than attempting to compete across the whole online gambling market. Online casinos such as the All Irish casino for example now offer casino games designed by NetEnt, a Swedish casino software company which also supplies some games to the new CasinoLand site. Again the casino games featured on these online casinos are not generally available on the larger sites.

In terms of variety of casino games some of these newer online casinos have successfully broken the stranglehold of the previously dominant software suppliers, and we now have games from Microgaming for example. They have done this by simply using more than one casino software supplier to provide their range of casino games. YakoCasino, CasinoLand and Instacasino have all successfully used this strategy.

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