International Online Casinos

Published on: February 1, 2009 

Before 2006 the focus of the online casino industry was the United States. America provided the majority of the customers and the majority of the revenue to the online casino industry. But when the American government passed the contentious UIGEA all this changed. UIGEA sought to prevent online gambling by cutting off the funds to online casinos. The regulations prescribed under UIGEA were so vague that Cryptologic and Playtech online casinos withdrew immediately from the United States. 

Playtech and Cryptologic turned their attention to the European online casino market. In addition Playtech began to invest resources in capturing a share of the Asian online casino market, which was then beginning to explode. Microgaming persisted with operations in the United States till the end of 2008. Then in the Kentucky domain name seizure case, Microgaming was singled out and targeted. It was this case that forced Microgaming to withdraw from America. Even while Microgaming was operating in America it could read the writing on the wall. Therefore it was preparing itself to compete in the international market.

One of the prime requirements of an international online casino is to be able to offer services in different languages. In Europe alone there are over a dozen different languages. The Asian markets require online gaming in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Players prefer to function in their native languages. This obviously increases their comfort level. But the major advantage is that they are able to correctly understand the terms and conditions written in their native language whereas they have some difficulty in correctly interpreting English. This reduces the number of disputes considerably. International players also prefer customer support in their native language. Customer support is not much use if players cannot understand what is being said.

Therefore the withdrawal of online gaming software developers from America gave rise to the need for multi lingual online casinos. Microgaming and Playtech took the lead in developing multi lingual international casinos. In the minimum this involved providing the software and customer support in different languages and then allowing the player to choose the language of preference. Playtech adopted this approach. Players have to choose the language before downloading the software. The software in the selected language is downloaded and installed. If a player wants to play in another language he has to repeat the process from scratch. It is as good as downloading a different casino.

Microgaming has gone a step further. The initial download is like in Playtech when the player chooses the language and downloads the software. However when he want to add a new language he can do so without exiting the software by downloading a small set of language files. This saves time and computer memory and is very convenient. It is thoughtful features like this that have made Microgaming the leader in the online casino software industry.

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