Source: Pixabay
Bingo is one of the longest-standing games, and as such comes with a certain reverence. It’s managed to last so long due to the ability to adapt and change based on what the circumstances call for. When toy salesman and Yahtzee-inventor Edwin S Lowe realized he could re-market and sell bingo, it gained a new lease of life in the 1930s. When the internet opened possibilities for gaming, online bingo took off and allowed players to engage in a different way. We have reached another watershed moment for the game and how it can appeal to a new generation of potential players. But does bingo need to adopt more themes to appeal to a wider audience?
Bingo has already begun to utilize themes in its online gameplay. Taking inspiration from a related game could be useful, as the Paddy Power bingo slots show with the incorporation of their slot games into the bingo offering. Slots are renowned for utilizing dozens of different themes, and the bingo slots allow players to engage with games based around Irish and Greek mythology, pirates, and ancient Egypt. This helped slots find new audiences who enjoyed the new themes. Bingo could easily follow suit and create games that are themed around various aspects of pop culture.
Source: Pixabay
For example, there is already a Deal or No Deal themed bingo room. The game of bingo is very much like the TV show, as players are blindly choosing briefcases much as they are randomly assigned bingo cards and the caller is blindly choosing the balls to call out. The tension of the game of bingo is merged with the tension in the studio during the classic gameshow to create an experience that players will immediately understand. This also entices them to play, especially if they haven’t played bingo online before.
But we could go one step further with the themes and as well as the atmosphere of the theme being infused into the bingo game, we could also change some of the other aspects of bingo to reflect the theme. Prizes could be related to the theme, for example, while the numbers could have a relation to the theme itself. For example, a sports theme could see players’ names called when the number called reflects their jersey number.
Adding themes to online bingo will be more likely to appeal to a typically more millennial audience, who may be more used to having a lot of choice. Something definitive and based around an existing brand, or something with striking iconography could end up swaying players to choose the site, especially with so much competition in the field. Older audiences, increasingly more online-savvy, could also be more likely to ease into online bingo if the game matched a theme they were interested in or promised to better reflect the traditional gameplay they were used to.
Themes for bingo aren’t commonplace just yet, but the popularity of the existing ones may spur on more developers. They work for slots and help change standard traditional gameplay into something more exciting and more appealing to a new crop of players.
