Despite what American Gaming Association CEO Bill Miller referred to as “measured” growth compared to the state-by-state spread of mobile sports betting, the AGA reported that online casino revenue grew 23% year-over-year in 2023, with Michigan narrowly bouncing New Jersey out of the top spot among states that have fully operational online casino markets.

Of that half-dozen, Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania accounted for about 90% — or $5.6 billion — of the $6.2 billion in national online casino revenue in 2023. Online gaming made up 24.7% of all commercial revenue in 2023, a figure that includes mobile sports betting.

Brick-and-mortar casinos also continued to thrive, as the nation’s 1,011 commercial properties grossed $49.4 billion in 2023, up 3.3% from the year before. The AGA’s vice president of research, David Forman, noted during a Tuesday press call that the average age of American casino visitors dropped for the fourth year in a row, to 42 in 2023 from 50 in 2019.

“Our industry kept growing and innovating,” said Miller, who called the recent Las Vegas Super Bowl “a full-circle moment for the city.”

Focus on so-called skill games

Nevada, unsurprisingly, ranked as the most robust retail casino market in the country in 2023, followed by New Jersey, Chicagoland, Baltimore-D.C., and Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, in that order. Outside of Nevada and Mississippi, Resorts World New York was the highest grossing retail casino, with Maryland’s MGM National Harbor ranking second.

In identifying threats to the industry, Miller again pledged to redouble efforts to snuff out unregulated offshore operators, a chore that’s easier said than done in light of the complexities of multi-jurisdictional task forces and foreign extradition laws. More tangible domestically are efforts by the so-called skill-game industry to legitimize their machines, many of which are located in convenience stores and local watering holes.

Miller remarked that the skill-game industry has spent “ungodly sums of money” to convince state legislators of their legality, adding, “We are not gonna stop until these games are regulated, the same as our industry, or put out of business.”

He continued, “Our view is these are a group of individuals who have brazenly entered a market without any regulatory interests at all. While there’s a VGT (video gaming terminal) law that exists in certain states (like Illinois and Pennsylvania), those are well-regulated, so there is a blueprint for this. My view is you shouldn’t reward bad actors with regulatory rewards.”

To this end, the AGA’s senior vice president of government relations, Chris Cylke, pointed to Pennsylvania as a state with the proper regulatory framework in place for such games, which he contends boast no more of a skill element than slot machines. And the fact that Pennsylvania has a regulated VGT market hasn’t stopped unregulated skill-game operators from flooding the state with their machines, a figure Miller put at “upwards of 100,000.”

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