Credit cards? How quaint
In the latest of a our series of blog posts looking back over the last decade, Probability boss Charles Cohen reflects on how egaming "just happened" and predicts that time in ten years, you'll be telling your kids about the quaint world of credit cards and coded transactions...
It’s fair to say 10 years ago egaming was not an industry at all, but a ragbag of start-ups operating in a world where the average PC had 256mb of RAM, a 56k modem was state-of-the-art, and no one had heard of Google.
Mobile phones still had pull out aerials and black and white screens. The idea that either of these devices were the future of gambling was, frankly, ludicrous.
So ludicrous, in fact, that if you were crazy enough to believe in this at the time, you are probably very rich indeed today.
Looking back, there was no big bang, no “year of egaming” between there and here. It just kind of happened.
1999 was the year that Victor Chandler moved his entire bookmaking operation to Gibraltar. Without this move, I doubt we would ever have had the Gambling Act, which basically raised the white flag on offshore gaming in the UK and, by extension, created the momentum for glacial European deregulation.
Of course, mass broadband penetration was the spark which lit the egaming bonfire. I doubt that anything would have happened without this.
In 2003 Chris Moneymaker won his seat at the World Series of Poker through PokerStars – and won it. You can date the start of the online poker boom to precisely that day. If he hadn’t won, poker would still be a college dorm game, and Ruth Parasol would not have made her millions.
That’s not what happened, though. Less than two years later, PartyGaming listed on the London Stock Exchange.
The question is, how will things develop? The lesson is, surely, that the past really isn’t a very good guide to the future. Don’t hold me to this, but here’s what I reckon will happen next: in 10 years there will be no desktop PCs as we know them today, or mobile phones for that matter.
A decade from now, you’ll be telling your children about the good old days of credit cards and quaint concepts like ATM machines, chargebacks and coded transactions.
Lastly, I think the last printed lottery scratchcard will be sold somewhere around 2020. The whole business will have moved online, and in particular, to the mobile devices.
To read the other posts in the From Dot Com to eGaming series, click here.
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