Believe it or not, some millennials actually play bingo games at bingo halls all over the UK.
How is that possible? Aren’t the young guys supposed to be flooding online bingo sites on their desktops and mobile devices? That’s the dominant notion, but bingo halls have also grown just as much as the online bingo industry has.
To give a great example, Netflix and all these content streaming sites didn’t entirely kill the movie theatre space. Besides, most dated bingo halls and clubs have since gone through massive overhauls to attract the younger generation while retaining the non-tech-savvy folks.
And while there are significant differences between land-based and mobile bingo, it might be a while before we can put bingo halls to rest for good. Let’s take a quick look at some of the contrasting features of these two bingo versions.
Convenience
The whole buzz about mobile bingo is the convenience that it brings. You can’t check into a bingo hall at 3:00 am. But you bet you can place bets whenever you want to at the touch of a button on your favourite bingo website.
Convenience comes in two ways. One is that your physical presence isn’t necessary. All you need is a desktop, a laptop, smartphone, or tablet, access to the internet, and you’re good to go.
You needn’t even be at home when gaming on a portable device. You could be on lunch –break at work, on vacation, or just chilling at the park on a sunny Saturday. With traditional bingo, players have to schedule a trip down to the bingo hall or social club, buy their bingo scorecards well in advance, take a seat, and get out their marker pens before the caller takes the podium to call out the numbers games.
Interactivity
You might think that land-based bingo meet-ups can create a social atmosphere that one-ups the chat rooms and online bingo player communities. You are right. There are some interactivity aspects of physical bingo locations that mobile bingo can’t measure up to, whichever way you look at it.
Brick and mortar bingo venues provide the opportunity for players to meet face-to-face and hush it out like you would while sitting with a friend at a restaurant. Punters can have a candid, real conversation in between bingo sessions and games and get the satisfaction of catching up, especially if it’s a case of old buddies who hadn’t seen each other in a long, long time.
Over at mobile bingo, chatroom hosts do their best to keep it lively and engaging for players and moderate chatroom games during gameplay, but much like social media, the interaction is virtual. It can never be all the way authentic compared to physical bingo locations.
Even peer-to-peer mobile bingo interactions between players simply can’t match up to a bingo hall’s physical, social atmosphere.
Automation
The use of technology is one of those instances where mobile bingo features trump bingo halls on any given day. First of all, you’ll need to show up at the bingo hall. That means you’ve got some planning to do, especially if you live quite a distance from the bingo hall.
While it can be a fun night out to the bingo hall in the company of friends or family, the long commute might be a bummer for some people. Once you get to the hall, you must pull out your bingo ticket or tickets if you plan on participating in either more than one bingo game or different bingo variations such as 90-ball and 75-ball games during your gameplay time at the bingo hall.
Bingo players must physically cross out the numbers as the caller yells them out. In the event of a win, you need a runner to sprint to the caller at the front of the bingo hall and confirm that you just hit a winning bingo pattern. The transition from one bingo game can take some time because the bingo hall operators might need to do some crowd control, particularly when the bingo hall sits several hundred attendants.
Mobile bingo players don’t have to deal with all that. It’s all about algorithms and random number generators, which automate the whole gameplay process. All you have to do is buy a ticket, kick up your feet, watch the bingo game unfold.
Mobile bingos have an auto-daub feature that marks the numbers in real-time. You don’t have to schedule a time to play bingo games because games are always active and available. Some are ongoing.
For example, progressive bingo jackpots only reset when a player bags the jackpot prize. At times players even win a bingo game without actively following the bingo session. The bots do all the heavy lifting.
Bonuses and Promotions
Unlike mobile bingo, land-based bingo venues can only hold so many players at any given bingo game or session. And although bingo players at halls and clubs are likely to spend more pounds on bingo tickets compared to mobile bingo participants, the bonuses and promotional packages punters at land-based bingo locations get pale in comparison to mobile bingo bonuses.
Mobile bingo sites attract millions of players in the UK and hundreds of millions more the world over. So a mobile bingo website can charge as low as 50p per ticket or £5 for, say, 2 or 4 tickets for jackpot bingo games and rake in millions in revenue.
With such huge profits, mobile bingos can give back to new players by offering bingo bonuses, deposit matches up to a certain amount, freemium bingo games, cash and real prizes, loyalty points that bettors can redeem into withdrawable cash balances, and much more.
Land-based bingos might not be able to pull such a move. Bingo hall players could still rip huge prizes, but truth be told, mobile bingos have the leverage when it comes to sustaining prizes and giveaways for bingo players in the long run.
Bingo is here to stay, and not even the fine line between land-based and mobile bingo sites can change that. However, two things are for sure, the love for bingo will continue to grow into the future, and so will inventions of more diverse bingo variations.
Citation:
Online bingo vs land-based bingo – JohnSlots.com
Online bingo vs Land-based bingo games at Unibet
The Difference Between Live Bingo Halls and Online Bingo
How Land-Based And Online Bingo Differ (fun4kidsarcade.com)
Land-Based vs. Online Casinos – Which is the Better Bet? – Blog – The Island Now
How land based & online bingo can happily coexist (bmmagazine.co.uk)