The future of casinos in the metaverse: How will they impact the industry?

One of the biggest potentials in the gaming industry at the moment is undoubtedly the metaverse – an online space where anything is possible. Despite this unlimited potential, is there room for casinos as we know them?

What is the metaverse?

The metaverse can be a little difficult to comprehend, if it’s your first time hearing about it. Basically, the metaverse doesn’t related to one particular website or company, but instead simple refers to a fictional, virtual world.

The concept has blown up in popularity due to virtual and augmented reality headsets, like the Oculus Rift or Meta Quest, which allow users to fully immerse themselves in the environments. These can be anything, from simple parks or buildings, to fully interactable environments.

While the metaverse can mean a whole host of things, with some metaverse casinos meaning those on the blockchain, or being facilitated by apps such as Telegram, for the sake of simplicity this article will focus on the casinos in virtual reality spaces.

How to use the metaverse

The metaverse is easy to use. Once you’ve calibrated the headset and the controllers, you can move around relatively easily – usually by pointing at the location you want to go and teleporting to it. Some games will let you use the joysticks to move around, but either way, this creates the illusion of being able to walk around the environment.

It’s relatively simple to make the environment interactable too. Players can open and close doors, pour themselves ‘drinks’, move objects around and participate in different activities. Some of the earliest video games built for the Metaverse were more tech demos than anything, where players could throw axes, use climbing walls or complete dance routines.

However, once developers understood the full potential of what the metaverse could do, the worlds in the games would become more complicated and thought out. There are entire AAA experiences in the metaverse now, with the potential only growing as more funding gets put into it.

Casinos in the metaverse

It wasn’t too long until developers realised that one of the most interesting environments they could build, were of course, casinos. Most of the games in casinos are easy to configure for the virtual reality environment, as they consist of picking up cards at the table, or placing chips down on the roulette felt. This meant that rather than developing new concepts, the teams simply had to translate the traditional games into VR.

Some fairly big names entered the industry too, even early on. Pokerstars, a brand from industry giant Flutter, launched Pokerstars VR on November 8, 2018. It gave players a casino to explore, where they could meet up with their friends, chat over the headset mics and enjoy an evening of poker together.

Pokerstars VR isn’t the only example, though. Other big names in the virtual reality casino space include Social Club, Bullet Roulette, Blackjack Bailey and JackpotVR. As you can probably guess, each of these spaces catered to a slightly different experience for the player.

The impact of casinos in the metaverse

So, what exactly have virtual reality casinos given us that we didn’t already have? They brought us better accessibility for some – not everyone can leave the house and visit a land-based casino, so it’s wonderful to be able to bring the casino to them. However, VR headsets are still incredibly expensive, so that concept falls flat pretty quickly.

One of the more innovative games from Bullet Roulette allows the player to play the infamous Russian Roulette game, but with a twist. Players will draw two cards, which can change the outcome of certain events, too. As this is impossible to play in real-life (at least more than once), due to obvious weapon-related reasons, it’s nice that VR has made it possible in a safe and fun environment.

But why stop there? With the limitless potential of metaverse casinos, why haven’t companies continued to strive for this innovation? Well, the answer is pretty simple… No-one really played them. It wasn’t specific to the casinos either, virtual reality headsets as a whole had a dramatically lower uptake than expected. Many companies have since dropped investment in VR games and experience because of it.

Not only were there low hardware sales, but also several other concerns regarding them too. The online casinos could offer very little in terms of age verification, as headsets could easily be accessed by children in a family, without the same unlocking protecting that many phones do. In addition, there were the risks of various cyber crimes, including harrassment, hacking and discrimination.

So what’s the future of metaverse casinos?

Luckily, virtual reality isn’t the be all and end all of the metaverse. Or at least, not the type to be limited to a headset.

The potential of the virtual space hasn’t been lost completely, as several companies have developed games that exist without needing a headset to access them. We’re not talking about the types that can be found on the phone, either.

One of the biggest markets in virtual reality is horseracing. This is slightly different from the typical ‘virtual sports’ offerings too, because these aim to create whole new worlds, stables and experiences within them, rather than just watching virtual horses race without needing to wait for a schedule.

Perhaps the future of betting and gaming in the metaverse will revolve around a virtual experience then, rather than relying on the gimmick of simply a casino in a headset. If companies can translate the freedom of virtual reality into a mobile or PC experience, then they could see infinitely more success.

In addition, we could also see some really interesting ideas be born from this from the player’s side! Just look at Bullet Roulette, and how that took an idea difficult to do in real-life, and transformed it through the virtual space.