It’s no secret that the online gambling industry has grown massively in recent years, but what might come as a surprise is the new types of hybrid games that are driving the recent success. How do they work and why have they captured the imagination of so many players?
Attracting the Fans of Two Types of Game
One of the clearest examples of hybrid games can be seen when we look at the Slingo genre, which is the result of combining bingo and slots into a single game. This results in a fresh new approach where the idea is to spin the symbols and mark off the numbers that appear each time until you complete winning lines.
Versions of the game have been added to sites that offer online bingo as well as traditional slots. This means that players can also look in the different bingo rooms for ways of playing this classic game, including those with free tickets and others that have jackpot prizes. In this way, it’s seen as a useful alternative for someone who already has an interest in playing bingo and might be interested in a new approach from time to time.
We can also see this way of playing in the live games sector, where some of the most popular slots like Gonzo’s Quest and Sweet Bonanza Live have been transformed by turning them into games with a live dealer. This often means using the original slot as a base game and adding bonus games that can be triggered. Crazy Pachinko by Evolution is another example, where the wildly popular Japanese pinball game is joined by a slots round to offer different winning mechanisms.
Creating New Types of Gameplay
Not all of these hybrid games are mash-ups between two originals. In some cases, elements from various ways of gambling can be used to create a new way of playing with widespread appeal. Some live games introduce rounds including dice, money wheels, and other elements that produce wins in different ways, while there are Slingo versions that add in the mechanics from game shows such as Deal or No Deal.
Crazy Time has a coin flip round, another featuring pachinko, and a cash hunt among the different parts. Turning this sort of highly varied gameplay into a coherent game is the biggest challenge for developers, and the solution often comes with the idea of using a theme that ties everything together, with the human presenter’s outfit and the set design as part of this design.
What to Expect Next?
It seems likely that we continue to see more gambling games that combine different ways of playing into something new. However, there appears to still be room in the market for the classics like bingo and slots that inspired these mash-ups in the first play.
In fact, it’s easy to imagine that new players who are introduced to online gambling through these hybrid games might later decide to look out for the original versions of games such as bingo. This would lead to the intriguing situation where the original could enjoy a boom in popularity thanks to the hybrids based on it.
