Tuesday was the one-year anniversary of Ontario’s internet-gaming market, so it was a good time for industry types to come together and celebrate what many see as a great achievement.
As iGaming Ontario’s Martha Otton told a sold-out crowd at a Canadian Gaming Association panel discussion event at the Toronto Region Board of Trade, the industry opened April 4, 2022, with 12 operators.
Now that number has eclipsed 40, with over 70 gaming sites. And with total wagers of about $35.6 billion over those first 12 months and approximately $1.4 billion in total gaming revenue, Ontario is now in the Top 5 of igambling jurisdictions in North America, when talking size.
AGCO has certified more than 5,000 games for use in the province.
Those iGO numbers don’t include results from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, which runs the Proline and casino platforms.
Providing player choice and protection was the government’s objective when they set down this path, Otton said, as well as cutting red tape, while going at the province’s thriving gray market, getting everyone licensed, and producing revenue for the province.
Establish a framework. Get operators into the market. Further establish Ontario as the best jurisdiction in the world, led by making sure the best player protections are in place, while supporting innovation. Those were the three steps, Otton said.
Then, during the CGA event, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) released the results of an IPSOS study conducted in March (more than 1,100 Ontarians surveyed), showing that 85.3 percent of respondents who gambled online said over the previous three months, they gambled on regulated sites.
The goal of shifting players from gambling on unregulated to regulated sites that comply with Ontario’s game-integrity and player protection standards seems to have been successful. An estimated 70 percent of online gambling occurred on unregulated sites before the launch of the market one year ago, according to AGCO data.
“Those numbers speak for themselves,” said Dave Phillips, chief operating officer of AGCO. “That’s a truly substantial shift. These are very encouraging numbers, where we are after the first year, but we have a lot of work to do.
“For so many years, so many voices out there said this couldn’t be done, that Canada’s gaming laws posed too many barriers to permit the creation of a truly competitive marketplace, that the unregulated market had become too entrenched, too beyond reach, and that it would be impossible to create a strong effective system of regulatory oversight.”
Phillips said that from what he’s been seeing, going to conferences, talking to people in other jurisdictions in the U.S., Europe, and in Canada, is Ontario is being looked upon as a model of success.
“Those results are another indicator of that success,” he told the crowd. “No one is suggesting that this has been absolutely perfect. This market is anything but static and we have very long road ahead. There are emerging challenges to face.”
