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Cost-conscious consumers seek their fun at home; smoking bans kill the pleasure of traditional gaming venues for tobacco addicts; high broadband penetration makes playing online an easy alternative.
Sounds familiar, perhaps. But this isn’t (only) a description of (parts of) the amusements industry: as a new report from research firm Research and Markets indicates, it’s the state of bingo too.
The study, Bingo in the Digital Age: Global Market Assessment and Forecasts, paints a rosy background to the sector: “bingo is one of the most popular and socially accepted games in the world,” it says, with 100m land-based players and, in some nations, greater popularity than cinema.
The game has also “long benefited from being seen as a safe pastime played by people who would not necessarily be the expected demographic to visit a casino or betting shop,” the researchers say.
But it’s being hit by falling attendances and declining revenues for many of the same reasons afflicting some arcades – and bingo players, too, are moving online. Indeed, the game’s social acceptability is likely hindering land-based bingo halls as much as it’s helping them, the report says: “Customers who would not necessarily regard themselves as ‘gamblers’ are unlikely to feel any unease about playing bingo and are flocking to the online game.”
The question for bingo operators, then, is not whether to embrace the Internet, but where to do it: should they enter markets such as the UK or continental Europe “where competition is already intense and global market share of gross gaming yield is set to fall, or a less developed market such as India which by virtue of being unproven carries greater risk”?
Most likely, if the shift to online gaming continues unabated, there’s revenue to be earned from both. But there’s also another option: might bingo halls, building on their reputation as dens of pleasure rather than iniquity, reinvent themselves in the guise of comprehensive leisure destinations?
