Competitive iGaming

Casino games are an inherently single-player genre. It is their nature. If you walk into any glittering casino resort in Vegas, you will see people sitting at the same blackjack table (probably fewer of them nowadays, with all the restrictions in place), but they are not playing together – they are simply playing against the same dealer. The single-player nature of casino games became obvious with the emergence of iGaming. All players at even the best online casinos for US players play their games alone, on computers or smartphones – and they don’t even brag about their big wins as they did on Slotomania and other social casino apps.

Inherently single-player

Back in the mid-2000s, there was an attempt to change this. One of the veteran developers of the iGaming industry, a British company called Microgaming, introduced a few multiplayer slot machines. These were not very different from the average games of this type when it came to their basics – they had the same reels, symbols, and bonuses. The major difference was that aside from the game screen you were playing on, there were several others “controlled” by other players (up to five of them). The games had leaderboards counting the lucky spins and winnings of the other players. 

As you might expect, multiplayer slots were not very successful. While there was a bit of competition in there, the games remained completely chance-based, meaning that nothing a player did would influence the results in any way. As you might expect, these multiplayer slots weren’t very long-lived – they disappeared soon after their release.

Tournaments for the win

Still, there is a form of competitive iGaming in online casinos: slot machine tournaments. These don’t involve multiplayer games at all. Instead, players play the games on their own, on their own devices, at their own pace. There are leaderboards but they are not live – they simply count the amounts won by individual players. 

While these tournaments are still not very competitive – after all, skill still doesn’t play any role in the results – they are much more popular than multiplayer slots. One of the reasons for this is the pacing of the tournaments: people can play in their own rhythm, on their own schedule (slot machine tournaments usually last for several hours, sometimes even days). Then, there’s the question of stakes: slot tournaments require participants to buy in, then allow them to play with virtual funds instead of their own money. This means that slots fans can “live big”, spin the reels at the maximum possible stakes, and hope for a big win. 

At the end of the tournament, the players with the biggest wins (or most successful single spins, depending on the nature of the tournament) are rewarded with a portion of the tournament’s prize pool (usually cold, hard cash – or its virtual counterpart) or other benefits, like bonuses or free spins. 

While iGaming will never be as competitive as eSports, for example, there is a bit of something in them that can captivate the players’ competitive spirit. 

This is a paid guest post.