Amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, India has seen a great spike in online casino visitors. The entire gambling industry is actually undergoing a major change as more people are trying to stay inside as countries are announcing lockdowns and quarantines. The outbreak has changed reality for a lot of industries that once relied heavily on public gatherings and the outside. Gambling is one of them. Often hailed as one of the most social industries, now the casinos are shut down in most countries with people being advised to stay away from public places. While for some industries this means immediately collapse gambling might still have a shot at staying afloat.
The online gambling scene in India
Online gambling has been a huge part of the entire industry for a while now. It has been getting bigger and bigger specifically in India. But this most recent spike in online casino users is mostly attributed to the nation’s wide self-quarantine practices that are geared towards reducing the effects and the spread of the coronavirus. As more people are spending time inside online casinos have found a whole new group of users.
Multiple casinos have reported higher visitors rates and increased amount of average time spent on the website, one of the websites that operate in India, Glaws recorded a 25% increase in traffic over the last week, with a 20% increase in transactions. The same goes for casinos like Poker Gangal which experienced a 15% increase in volume and almost the doubling of the time that the users are currently spending on the website. The same goes for one of the biggest online operators in the country, Games2Win, which usually has 1.2 billion people playing but over the period of this outbreak, their average user base has increased to 1.5 billion.
What is contributing to this growth?
But there are other factors that should be considered when thinking about this sudden increase in demand for online casinos. While India is not in a lockdown, and the measure taken to stop the coronavirus is not as severe as in some other places, the public gatherings are still prohibited and the casinos in Goa and Sikkim are closed down.
But the main reason is that Indians finally have enough time to explore this side of gambling. What might seem natural to those who have always played online, it may be weird that it would take a self-isolation to get people to play. But this proved to be true in many ways and now India’s online gambling industry is finally getting the attention and traffic it always wanted.
