The Observatory on Online Gaming of the University of Milan ran an event of presentation on a casino games report. The topic was the status of the Italian online gaming market in 201,3 which disclosed some interesting information. Their findings cannot put operators in a very good mood as the gross gaming revenues of the Italian online gaming market were equal to € 725 million in 2013, showing a minor decline of 3% compared to 2012. However, it is more interesting to see the break-down of such data through the different categories of games.

Indeed, casino games grew by 63% mainly driven by the launch of online slots at the end of 2012 which now generate half of € 240 million deriving from this category of games. On the contrary, the gross gaming revenues generated by poker games, that in the past were the main product in the market, were reduced by 35% with only € 222 million of gross gaming revenues.

At the same time sports betting games recovered from 2012 that was defined as the “terrible” year reaching almost € 200 million which are still far from € 243 million generated in 2009 despite of the technological development and of the launch of mobile devices in the last years.

The above mentioned data raise some questions as to the future of the sector, is the Italian online gaming market in a decline phase? The answer is no! And indeed the head of remote games at AAMS informed the audience during the event that he had been able to convince eight major casino games suppliers to prevent their operators from offering their games to Italians through non-Italian licensed platforms by the end of 2014.