Slot games were some of the first casino titles to arrive on the internet, appearing sometime around 1996. Launching to considerable success and appreciation, slots since that point have only grown more prolific. As part of the evolving digital frontier, these games have had to keep pace with what the online world provides and demands. Mapping a complex route illustrative of several forms of design, slots act as a microcosm of many parts of the software industry, and we want to explore why. 3m4w6o
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For a look at the current state of the slot game market, let’s turn to a major contemporary casino website. Paddy Power offers online slot games as a key feature of their experience, for example, with titles like Reel Talent, Hot Zone, and Nitro Circus. These games operate with top-tier graphics and sound, feature a wide variety of licensed and original themes, and play perfectly well over both mobile and desktop platforms. It was a long journey to reach this point, so how did we get here?
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The goal of entertainment software has always been to leverage as much potential as possible from a host device. The more limited a system’s hardware, the more limited the final product, creating an almost linear pattern of advancement. The most obvious form of this advancement is demonstrated by easy-to-quantify aspects like pixel count, animation, and audio quality.
In all these ways, digital slot games have been consistently upping the ante since their inception. Games look better, they’re more colorful and include better animations, and they involve audio quality on the same level as professional albums and movies. While functionally almost identical to earlier slots in of gameplay, it was the want from players for improved experiences that drove the need to move forward.
This evolution then continued with the arrival and then domination of the smartphone. First popularized by Apple’s iPhone range, smartphones in the US alone went from 2% penetration in 2005 to more than 80% in 2016 according to the website Comscore. With access to software on the go, players then demanded their slots to be playable anywhere, which again facilitated a significant industry shift.
Moving slots to mobile might have seemed simple to outsiders, but in reality, it was the result of enormous structural changes to slot programming and design. Until the mid-2010s, slot games were, like most web-based interactive entertainment, built on Flash. As Flash became unsafe and inefficient, it had to be abandoned, as explained by How-to Geek.
What replaced it was advancements in HTML technologies, which were given the label HTML 5. Unlike Flash, which often didn’t play well with mobiles, HTML 5 worked over practically all web-capable devices. This required a fundamental redesign of thousands of existing games, but since that’s what players needed and wanted, the process was almost universally adopted. This then led to a revolution in UI translation between computer and mobile play, another step toward total coverage.
While the last couple of years has been uncharacteristically steady in the landscape of online slots, they’re still constantly seeing updates to features not entirely obvious. Each year makes them safer, better looking, and with wider for different platforms, even if players don’t notice. In the software industry, this one humble type of game encomes so many of the challenges that need to be met and overcome. From players’ desires to technical requirements, slots have traveled a long way, and in a manner that anyone involved with software design can easily appreciate.