Friday view: Tablet growing pains
With tablet sales expected to exceed 1m in the UK alone over Christmas the tablet gaming sector is about to take a big leap forward, but the direction is still uncertain
With tablet sales predicted to top 1m over Christmas in the UK alone online gambling operators are bracing themselves for a major new opportunity. The bigger screen size and more stable wi-fi connections present a real opportunity to grow the still underexploited mobile gaming sector, but all is not quite what it appears.
A large number of the tablet sales are expected to be to under 18s over the Christmas period, but to focus on this would be to miss the growing trend. Laptops are being replaced by tablets and consumers generally moving to touch screens for all their leisure browsing.
IDC has previously predicted tablet sales will overtake PC sales in Q4 2013 and overtake them permanently by 2015. The general industry view is laptops reaching the end of their life cycle will be replaced by tablets for home use and many operators are banking on apps replacing the download casino many thought had died a few years back.
But the bad news is there is no denying Android is likely to dominate the tablet market in the years to come. For at least two years now the predictions have been for apps to replace the valuable download casino, and on iPads this will be where a great deal of resource is focused, but on Android tablets apps present as many problems as they solve.
Mobile web will continue to gain in importance, but with HTML5 arguably not up to the task of providing an immersive gaming experience this does present some issues for operators. The good news is that despite the rush of budget laptops hitting the market, the Samsung Galaxy 3 and the iPad Air are predicted to be the two big sellers. This allows operators for the most part to develop for these two platforms in the first instance and to an extent ignore the wider device fragmentation.
One other potential issue is tablet use as likely to resemble laptop usage as it is mobile. Tablets are often static devices used to browse the web, send emails and deal with the tasks normally used by a laptop. Anyone treating them as smartphones with increase screen size is not likely to do too well from the new post-Xmas market.
As with mobile, the solution adopted by most operators is likely to be to continue dual development on native apps and mobile web trying to cast the net as wide as possible. The trouble there is this is an increasingly expensive way to operate and potentially leaves you open to app specialists, but missing out on the Android market is not something any operator can afford to do.
Unfortunately the reality is that despite the range of predictions out there is no clear picture of how the market and consumer usage is going to evolve on tablets. The first half of 2014 is sure to be a crucial time for the gaming sector, and operators will be hoping a lot more iPads get sold than Tesco Hudls.