Bingo has been around for already a few centuries. Its roots come from Italy and it is assumed that the game was designed back in 16th century. Offline bingo has been very popular in the UK right until the year of 2005. The year was marked as the most popular for bingo, as there were a total of 600 offline spots to play bingo. Just a few years ago this number has declined sharply, and now there are roughly 350 places to play bingo offline. The main reason for this is the bingo sites worth to check were launched online and people moved into playing online. In addition to this, the taxes went up and it simply became less profitable to operate a bingo place. Finally, a smoking ban was introduced, which made it less attractive to visit an offline spot when compared to playing online. Hence, one way ask a question: what fuels the player’s interest? Is that an experience or a desire to win?
It is all about the process
Such a decline in a number of the bingo places in the UK certainly demonstrates us that the prize is just an additional incentive for playing the game. Unlike other betting or gambling activities, bingo rarely provides a chance to win big. Typically, a bingo night consists of some 50 people, while it takes some resources to organize the event. Hence, the prizes tend to be worth not more than a fraction of the pot, usually ending up with a value of $10 or less. Hence, we can clearly see that bingo is more of a time spent than a gambling activity.
Is this still relevant online?
Things are, of course, different when it comes to the web services. Unlike a certain offline bingo place, a web service does not have to pay the rent, salaries or even print the cards. Such a service needs to compensate its developers, designers and pay up for the hosting instead of the rent. The good thing is that these costs tend to scale much better with the amount of players. So, an online bingo site can definitely offer a more attractive prize pool, and this is why online bingo is becoming popular as never before. Especially for the players that are excited about the prize itself, not the game. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the online bingo players still sees the game as a certain recreational activity. Another advantage of playing bingo online is that a web service can accommodate more games, hence a player does not have to wait until a certain hour on a given day, but play every minute. Also, there are different game set ups. As a conclusion, we can clearly say that online gambling industry disrupts one of the oldest games and we might be able to see almost no offline bingo spots over the next decade. It seems like the only thing where an offline bingo place has an edge is that it still has to be regulated by the Gambling Commission in the UK.
