Online slots are more popular than ever, but even if you have played on one of the growing numbers of sites that offer slot games many times, you might not realize what is going on behind the scenes to bring this experience to your computer or smartphone.
To remedy this, here is a look at the technologies involved and the different roles they play in powering the modern online slots market.
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Underlying Infrastructure
If you can understand how to play slots, it should be simple enough to grasp the basics of what hardware and software is used to power modern casino sites.
In most cases the sites themselves will be hosted on a dispersed hosting infrastructure, serving customers in different parts of the world via datacenters that are closest to them.
This is done to ensure that the experience is as efficient and seamless as possible, as relying on far-off hosting solutions can hamper page load speeds and introduce all sorts of other hiccups.
The intervening connectivity is handled by whatever internet service provider is used by a given customer, and the experience can vary depending on their location and the speed of the network they are using. Knowing that these variables exist is important since it lets customers determine whether the site is to blame for any hold-ups, or whether the problem lies closer to home.
Software
There is an interesting distinction in the online slots world between the front-end software of the casino sites that host the games and the software of the games themselves, at least from a development standpoint.
While you might assume that both of these solutions have the same point of origin, in actuality very few casino sites develop their own games in-house.
Instead, most games are built by experienced, dedicated development teams, with major brands such as Microgaming, NetEnt, and IGT responsible for pumping out large numbers of slots, which are then embedded in third-party sites by casino operators.
Aside from this quirk of the industry, it is also worth noting that there has been a shift in the way that slot games are coded over the years. While many early examples were written to run in Flash, the gradual death of this platform, along with the emergence of better-optimized rivals, meant that the switch to HTML5 was all but inevitable, and today this is one of the dominant ways to play online slots.
Mobile Support
Another key facet of the tech at the heart of the online slots sector is that it must be mobile-friendly. This means that casino sites need to be designed to appear correctly on smaller screens, as well as being equipped with interfaces that are suitable for touch-based interactions. The same goes for the games themselves, with icons, aspect ratios, and text size all tuned to take advantage of the fact that many players will be using smartphones and tablets.
This in turn means that the majority of the top online slot sites also have dedicated, standalone mobile applications, typically targeting both Android and iOS to reach the broadest possible audience, which means they can even be played via emulator.
The advantage of playing in-app rather than via a web browser is that the experience should be well-tuned to the specific hardware features of the handset in question, although since slot games are less demanding than other modern mobile titles, performance should be good on almost any relatively modern device.
The only thing that’s left to do is sign up to your online slot site of choice and start playing, and let the underlying tech do all the heavy lifting.
