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2016 turns out to be an interesting year coming up, a kind of watershed for online and mobile gaming. Almost 80% of the gamers worldwide are playing as mobile customers. Mobile gaming, with its large surge of players in 2013, a surge that is expected to continue, will double its growth by 2016.

What we find particularly interesting (even more than the demographic stuff like age ranges or gender or behaviours of gamers) is how popular tablet gaming is becoming. Can you guess the expected growth rate for tablets in particular?

Tablet Revolution

A whopping 400% growth until 2016 is forecasted for gaming using tablet computers. This seems to prove the proclamations we’ve heard over the past two years that tablet devices have the potential to be the world’s most used and therefore most loved game system, if you will.

Tablets are in many ways superior to home consoles -- the newest version of Android actually mimics a home-based gaming system like the PlayStation or X-Box, yet is portable.

Where and How

Can you guess the geographical part of 2013’s historic developments for online gaming, or how this form of entertainment will spread over earth in 2014?

Nobody should be too surprised that the Asia Pacific region will be the hotbed of innovation and revenue. This one region alone contains nearly 50% of all worldwide game-playing activity.

Are you wondering what any of these trends mean to you, as a player?

Innovation

Your gaming experience will improve dramatically year by year -- but probably more like month by month! One area that will explode (more or less in step with increasing bandwidth) is video integration.

Far beyond video chats for casino-lovers and mobile bingo hacks, or even live Roulette using real-time video, and loads of new applications we have not seen yet, we’ll finally get comfy with video as a medium in its own right.

The advance of online and mobile video will step forward hand-in-hand, so to speak, with the recent updates to basic Web programming. What this update to HTML5 means to you is freedom from native apps that clog up your mobile devices.

Convergence

With HTML5 (and most gaming sites have already updated to its standards), all multimedia content can now perform perfectly inside the browser window without the help of plugins. Flash is gone, folks.

The implications of this update are profound for online gaming in general. For the first time in history, the entire code of the Web has shifted not only to accommodate mobile websites, but to make them run faster. For the first time in history, the Web is mobile.

And that means online gaming is primarily a mobile proposition now. The next big shift, of course, since that different mobile platforms (Windows, Android, Apple, Blackberry) no longer need to be designed for exclusively, is that massive creative energy will be redirected at game production.

Show Biz

Already, there are significant flows of talent circulating between the film industry (particularly animation) and game studios, like Swedish Net|Ent. This firm exemplifies where we are heading off the spring-board of 2013: gaming is becoming ‘entertainment’, as main-stream as films and other pastimes.

This certainly holds true for real-cash mobile casinos and mobile bingo, which were once marginalized merely as ‘gambling’. The UK’s regulated betting and gambling markets show just how main-stream such forms of entertainment can (safely) become.

The Face of Things to Come

If you are curious how mobile gaming will now be marketed to us, we’re betting that the points we have discussed above will turn up as the benefits offered by mobile gaming operations, like casinos. Performance and innovation will be the main messages extended by marketing done by the gaming industry directly to consumers.

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