The Value Of The Online Casino Industry
The online casino industry has grown in leaps and bounds in a very short time. It has the potential to grow even more but often times legislation gets in the way and prevents more growth.
The players have already made up their mind though, and they are all in for online casino gaming. Online casinos have offered a more player focused experience where you get a massive library of games to play as you want and when you want.
The introduction of Live Dealer gaming has added yet another dimension to online casinos, so soon, land based venues will be very much on their toes to try and keep up.
To see what the industry is worth currently we will need to look at some of the main gaming markets.
The UK Market
One of the few countries that have a well-set legal framework for online gaming is the UK. The UK gaming industry is worth and estimated £4.5 billion every year. That is a third of the entire world gambling market. Of that figure, just over half is attributed to online casinos alone.
These figures are from 2017 and represent a £ 100 000 000 increase in online casino expenditure since the previous year’s figures. This is a relatively small increase suggesting that the growth has started to level out.
The breakdown with regards to which games are being played shows that slots are still the king of online gaming, generating £1.6 billion of the total £2.4 billion in online casino revenue. Table games by contrast account for around £377 million of the total online casino revenue.
The US Market
In comparison to the UK industry, US online gambling will generate an estimated $7.4 billion this year. This figure is comprised of the online sport betting sector as well as the online casino gaming.
This figure can be much, much bigger but at the moment the US is still tightly regulating the industry thanks to the powerful land based casino lobby groups. They have gone so far as to legalise interstate online gambling, generating $463 million for New Jersey alone.
If these figures come out of a very limited sector of the country, you can imagine what figures the US will be posting if online gambling is legal in the entire country.
What is clear here is that soon the online casino market may overtake the land based casino industry. Playing casino games at a land based venue is fun, but online casinos are easier to access, offer bigger game selections and larger bonuses, making them al the more appealing.