Ontario iGaming has released a market report for the first quarter of 2023, and online casinos continue to hammer online single-event sports betting in the free commercial market. More than 80% of the action (83%) and over 70% of the nascent market’s revenues came from casino gaming rather than sports betting.

The numbers starkly contrast with some of the projected estimates coming out of the Canadian province before the market opening in early 2022. Those numbers seem to have all but disappeared from the news, being overwhelmed by the sheer reality of what it is in fact, that Canadians like to bet on casino games a lot more than they care to bet on sports.

iGaming Ontario Fiscal Year Began April 1

When referring to first quarter numbers, the information relates to (Q1) of the 2023-24 fiscal year which ran from April 1 through June 30, 2023.

Outside and casual observers might also be surprised which sports got the most action with basketball leading hockey by orders of magnitude. Sports bettors were “turned off” by betting ads all over television and other media and the country hasn’t won a Stanley Cup in ice hockey for three decades.

That being said, online casinos dominated the money story with over 5x as much in wagers ($11.6B vs $2.B) than sports betting but operator win was much less as a percentage of turnover, as is to be expected, when comparing the amount of money players left on the tables, in the virtual slots, and on the book. Casinos produced $392M in revenue as opposed to the $182M that betting generated.

The market currently has 71 gambling sites in operation, five less than at the end of the year but has picked up one additional operator. The number of active accounts has shrunken a bit as well to less than one million.

However, it must be kept in mind that it does not mean there are a million online gamblers in the province that play at regulated, taxed, and licensed websites as each account is counted separately.

The minimum number of participants could be as few as 12,958 or as many as 920,000. Among other reasons, since many operators only allow one bonus across all of their websites, it’s highly unlikely any but a small handful of customers have over 50 separate accounts, but it’s also a stretch to think that nearly anyone has less than half a dozen – making the probable number of actual active players fall somewhere on the lower end of the spectrum, but still in the hundreds of thousands.

The average spend per active player account during Q1 was $197.

Money wagered on slots was more than that wagered on all table games combined, and here again the apples and oranges must be sorted out. Slots spins happen more rapidly than table game bets in succession so the games will see a lot more betting, however, table game bets – both virtual and live dealer casino bets, are usually larger. Regardless, slots made up some 48% of all wagers while live casino games made up about 32% of all gaming wagers with virtual random number generator-based table games accounting for at least 8% of the remainder while peer-to-peer bingo games made up the rest.

This quarterly report was the first time that game-by-game volumes could be extracted from an iGaming Ontario report.

First Full-Year Numbers Released in Tandem

Following is a breakdown of the 2022/2023 fiscal year numbers (FY2022-23 – April 4, 2022, to March 31, 2023) as provided by the authority.

• Last year, casino games, including slots, live and computer-based table games as well as peer-to-peer bingo, accounted for nearly $28B (78%) of total wagers and $940M (67%) of gaming revenue.
• Betting, including traditional sports, esports, proposition, and novelty bets accounted for $7B (20%) of total wagers and $433M (31%) of gaming revenue last year.
• P2P poker accounted for $992M (3%) of total wagers and $40M (3%) of gaming revenue last year.

None of the numbers above in any section include Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. (OLG) information, which will be released at a later date. As such, it is not possible to directly infer any amount of direct losses or cannibalization to the long-existing Crown Corporation public/private partnership operation which formerly ran a monopoly on Canadian-licensed casino games through its PlayOLG website.

As always, Canadians in Ontario and other provinces are free to bet at offshore casinos as well – with those numbers still obscured by a lack of centralized regulatory reporting in jurisdictions such as Malta or any reporting from licensing jurisdictions like Curacao which handle those operators.

The Kahnawake Gaming Commission does not provide market reports either.

“As part of its commitment to sharing aggregate revenue and market insight reports, iGO intends to continue releasing, at minimum, a market report every quarter,” iGO said Wednesday.

Source: iGaming Ontario’s FY 2023-24 Q1 Market Performance Report, iGaming Ontario, July 19, 2023

The post Provincially licensed casino operators are dominating the online space outstripping sports handily appeared first on Keno Wizard.

SOFTSWISS was a pioneer in the online crypto-casino movement and continues to assert dominance in the arena now. Being the leader of a multi-metric solutions company focused on cryptocurrency gambling puts the company in a unique position to analyze the state of Coins in iGaming. In addition to more than a decade of experience, the company presumably has access to more data than anyone else on the subject through the provenance of its Game Aggregator and Casino Platform. The company has about 700 clients using one or both of those solutions.

In addition to annual reports, SOFTSWISS also publishes quarterly updates. While the just-in-time information is valuable, the annual reports tend to reflect longer-term trends better.

The current trends in digital coin gambling for the year 2022 compared to 2021 are not exceptionally rosy nor is the current trend toward returning to fiat currencies for online gambling seen recently. Caveats should be stated before digging into the numbers too deeply: All data comes from SS customers; partway through the year they introduced a coin-to-fiat converter and all bets placed in fiat currencies, even if the deposit and withdrawals were cryptos, were counted as fiat bets.

The value of Bitcoin and Ethereum which are the two biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap fell 65% and 67% year on year.

Overall, crypto betting fell nearly 15% but Ether increased its share of the total bets made against Bitcoin. We’ll dig into that in a moment as well.

Crypto trends in iGaming are inextricably tied to the macroeconomy and crypto’s place in it. That said, many players may have been reluctant to use digital currencies thanks to the chaotic events it was involved in including November’s FTX debacle. The overall crypto climate was basically unstable for most of the year, but gambling on the company’s platform did increase appreciably when taking fiat currency into account.

The company’s platform saw a 31% increase in total bets made in 2022 over those made in 2021. Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) increased 36% over 2021 numbers.

The platform handled over 20 billion euros in bets during the second quarter alone last year including fiat and cryptocurrencies. That number continued to grow throughout the year. The average bet placed increased by some 35% in Q2 2022 compared to the same quarter in 2021.

Contributing to the rise in numbers may have been an increasing number of SOFTSWISS game aggregator clients, new partnerships with 18 game studios and three new providers accredited in Malta, and the consistent geographical expansion of existing clients.

GGR rose 36% in 2022 from 2.4b EUR to 3.3b – much of that might be attributable to the explosive Latin American market expansion with SS working steadily to help clients capture the nascent lucrative market.
Looking at the phenomenal growth of fiat betting as well as revenues compared to less-than-stellar crypto performance we see BTC and ETH moved in different directions. Bitcoin’s slice of the total crypto pie lost 7.4% percentage points over the year while Ethereum gained in popularity among players by 3.7%.

Chief Operating Officer at SOFTSWISS, Vitali Matsukevich commented: “The fact that we see an increasing number of new fiat projects does not diminish the power of the already established worldwide community of crypto players. There is still a strong drive for iGaming operators to implement and expand payment methods supporting digital coins. iGaming tech providers will still be focused on developing new crypto-centric tools. For example, we’ve launched the In-Game Currency Conversion feature allowing the crypto audience to enjoy all available games through automatic conversion of digital coin bets into fiat wagers.”

Fiat bets accounted for 76% of all bets on the platform by the end of 2022.

The top three digital currencies used along with their share of the total were

Bitcoin – 72.7%
Ethereum – 13.6%
Litecoin – 5.5%

DOGE picked up in popularity as did LTC while USDT nearly doubled its share from 1.7% of all crypto bets to 3.7%. Bitcoin Cash fell off the top six list and was replaced by XRP at an inaugural .7% share.

CEO Matsukevich expressed optimism for 2023 and asserted that players will not abandon crypto thanks to its decentralized nature, transaction speed, and anonymity.

He added: “Despite all digital coin fluctuations, crypto has already gained a significant share among players and operators and has become an integral part of the market. For this reason, SOFTSWISS continues to strengthen its partners’ projects, whether fiat or crypto, with new innovative tools and solutions, providing operators with security, reliability, and top-level service.”

Source: SOFTSWISS, an invitation to view the report, February 23, 2023

The post SOFTSWISS partner GGR was up 36% in 2022 with fiat betting dominating appeared first on Keno Wizard.