Big money in Atlantic City internet gambling
News on 16 Apr 2013
News on 16 Apr 2013
Atlantic City’s land casinos can anticipate gross gambling yield of up to $262 million in the first full year of online gambling legalisation in New Jersey, reports the industry research and consultancy firm GamblingData.
Total GGY will rise to $462 million a year when the market reaches maturity, which GamblingData expects to occur in the fourth year of regulation.
If casinos are permitted to offer online casino games and poker, as expected, GamblingData estimates that online casino will account for between 50 percent and 60 percent of total GGY over a four-year period, with online poker accounting for the balance.
Online casino GGY is expected to ramp up steadily between years one and four. Online poker GGY, by contrast, is predicted to grow explosively in years one and two before cooling down in the subsequent two years.
“The disparate ramp-up rates we expect in online casino GGY and online poker GGY reflect what we’ve seen in data from the Italian online gaming market, which we used to inform our forecasts,” said Daniel Stone, an executive at GamblingData and the report’s lead author.
“While we expect Atlantic City casinos to steadily capture new online casino customers over the first four years of regulation, we believe the casinos will attract new online poker customers mainly in the first two years of regulation.”
A few well-known names are expected to vie for market supremacy. These include Caesars Entertainment and Boyd Gaming, which control leading gaming brands and large player databases, and which will fight for the lion’s share of total GGY.
Pokerstars could be the elephant in the room if its attempt at acquiring the Atlantic Club land casino is successful.
The GD report notes that New Jersey is in the vanguard of U.S. online gaming regulation, recently becoming the fourth state to legalise online gaming behind Delaware, Nevada and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
“Online gaming regulation has really begun to gain momentum at the state level, and I think we’re approaching the tipping point,” said the report’s co-author, Chris Krafcik.
Ten states are currently considering online gambling in one form or another, and Krafcik predicts that around 11 or 12 individual US states will be thinking about legalisation options by the time 2013 closes, a significant increase on the four that were discussing the possibility a year ago.
The New Jersey Online Gaming Data Forecasting report is the latest release from GamblingData’s forecasting project. It follows on from recent reports on the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece and Sweden.
