British Columbia government wants you to go mobile with your gambling

Gambling is a fact of life no matter how much the government might want to make it only legal if they have their fingers in the pie, much like this recent move by the government of British Columbia in Canada.

Apparently they have put the call out to mobile app developers to try and bring their PlayNow service to the new mobile frontier. While critics of the idea point to the ease with which this would put gambling into the hands of the province’s youth and gambling addicts the government responds by saying they are just answering the call from users.

NDP MLA Shane Simpson is worried that too many teenagers and young adults, who are the most common users of smartphones and heavy app downloaders, will get hooked on the convenience of PlayNow in moblle form and treat it like a game, not a real gambling scenario.

But the BCLC says it needs to meet the demands of its users, with CEO Michael Graydon describing the company as “not creating a channel” but rather “responding to a channel that exists today.” He noted that illegally operated websites accessible in BC already have mobile apps, and the purpose of PlayNow is to attract users to legal gambling.

via TechVibes

And besides the government needs to make sure it has access to all those millions of gambling dollars in order to bolster up their retirement funds.