By admin - June, 24th 2014

Today, with so much competition in the online gaming industry, it really feels like it’s a player’s market with such a choice of great promos to take advantage of, whichever site you decide to join.

Only a year ago, the biggest welcome bonus you could get on many of the gaming sites was only about 200%, but now there are a number of sites that offer 300%, 400% and even 500% welcome bonuses (up to a certain limit) in order to tempt new players to join.

As well as the welcome bonuses, there is also a constant stream of different promotions going on at new bingo sites such as Winner Bingo, where you can get up to £40 free playing credit when you deposit £10 in the first week after you join the site. At Winner at the moment, there’s a World Cup promo called Football Frenzy which features a series of escalator jackpot games, with daily £1,000 games that only cost a penny to play, and the prizes increase to £1966 on the days that England are playing. Sadly for the England team, it looks like the game on 24^th June will be their last in this World Cup though! But England fans shouldn’t worry; they can still enjoy the World Cup winners night where there’s a total of £50,000 in bingo prizes to play for.

So why is it that the bingo and gaming sites want to give us all this free money to play with and extra promos on top? Of course, we consumers are savvy enough to understand that they’re not doing it altruistically or out of the goodness of their hearts. Tempting new players in with a generous welcome offer means that we will commit to playing with them, even if it’s only for as long as our first deposit and amount of credit will last. But during that time when we’re trying out the games that the site has to offer, the other promotions such as free games of bingo or special games themed around big events like the World Cup will add to the good feeling we have each time we go on the site. People generally tend to like what they know and would rather stay with the site they’ve got familiar with rather than having to find their way around a new site.

The competition within the industry is really high at the moment, especially as more and more of us gamers switch from playing games on the desktop or laptop to playing them on our mobile devices. All the bingo and gaming sites now offer mobile options for their players and according to reports such as the one produced by Juniper Research, this is where the majority of gaming will be done in the future. The Juniper Research report in December 2013 estimated that another 100 million gamers will begin to play on their mobiles during the next five years. This means more than 164 million will buy a lottery ticket, place a bet or play a mobile casino or bingo game by 2018. A lot of the growth in mobile gaming is predicted to be in North America, where up until recently, it was not possible to gamble online in many States. Now, it’s legal to gamble in Nevada and New Jersey, and other states will follow.

Mobiles are proving popular for gaming and gambling because it’s often easier than using your pc. If you’re watching a live sports game, it’s easier to place a live in-play bet on your mobile than leave the TV screen to go to your pc. Similarly, you can have a few rounds of bingo during half-time during a football match without having to miss out on the analysis if you play on your mobile. The convenience factor of playing games or placing bets on a mobile is a big attraction and it means that more of us will sign up for mobile betting and gaming services. If we’re already customers of a particular gaming or bingo site and enjoy the experience of playing there on a pc, we’re more likely to stay loyal and try the same company’s mobile offering first.

While the offers and bonuses are so plentiful, we consumers should just enjoy it; remembering the golden rule of any betting or playing real-money games: never play with money you can’t comfortably afford to live without.