As smartphones and tablets proliferate, it is no surprise that the Financial Times reported that Betfair, a UK betting exchange group, saw a 94% YOY growth in the number of bets made on mobile devices. The same article also reported that over one third of customers on PaddyPower, a Dublin-based bookmaker, were now making transactions on mobile devices, generating more than a fifth of its digital bets.While the article suggests “technological shortcomings” of hardware as the primary reason for a relatively late entrance into the mobile space, another important factor that needs to be considered is that gambling operators are not software developers. Their core competencies are dealing with laws & regulation, gambling operations, and marketing, not building innovative games. This leads to many gambling games being mediocre applications of old ideas at best.

In today’s market, users are no longer satisfied with mediocre game play. The incredible growth of social gaming has raised the bar for user experiences in all genres, with game developers constantly improving the functionality of their games. But with an 800-pound gorilla named Zynga dominating the market, independent developers have a harder time building successful gaming businesses. This is especially true because they rely on limited monetization methods such as virtual goods and in-game advertising, which generally require very large audiences or enough high-spending whales to generate a decent return.

In today’s world, the high quality of games developed by social game studios should be crushing these antiquated casino games and reaping the massive rewards of real-money play. However, gambling companies can afford their lack of innovation because because it is so expensive and time consuming for a developer to acquire a gambling licenses. These licenses are walls that effectively keep developers away from this golden opportunity to make money off the most valuable players online.

So why is it that gambling operators that hardly innovate their software can reap massive rewards, while social game developers have to innovate constantly in order to secure a meaningful piece of the gaming pie? Because gambling operators generate much more revenue per user than social gaming companies, they can make plenty of money by keeping those players around with marketing rather than creating innovative new software. After analyzing the financial reports and key performance indicators of bwinparty, the first major gambling operator to offer real-money poker on iOS and Android, we can see the tremendous value of a online casino gambler.Game developers looking to incorporate real-money gambling and betting haven’t had any options beyond acquiring their own license, which is why we created Betable. Check out developers.betable.com for more information on how we give game developers the ability to integrate real-money play into their games without the tremendous pain of acquiring their own gambling license.