The Early Line: Lawmakers Tackle Sweepstakes + What's Next
The fate of sweepstakes casinos and sportsbooks will be a major plot line in 2025
TCL offers a roundup of recent US gambling news called The Early Line every Monday.
NCLGS tackles sweepstakes | I shared this on Friday, but here is the only real first-hand story I have seen on the sweepstakes panel at the winter meeting of the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States. (That’s kind of crazy considering how much oxygen the topic gets in the gambling industry right now.) There weren’t really any bombshells from the panel, it appears, but it shed some light on where things stand heading into 2025.
Reading the line: From this dispatch, and from what I have gleaned behind the scenes, “it’s complicated” describes the reality of what is going on. Some parts of the regulated gambling industry very much want sweeps to go away. However, the delta between that desire and the actual will and logistics to make that happen seems to be pretty wide. Do regulators even have the jurisdiction to act to stop sweeps in a lot of states? And if they do, do they want to? Will attorneys general step into the action like they did in 2015-2016 for daily fantasy sports? Sometimes it would clearly take a new law to stop sweeps from operating; is a law banning or regulating sweeps a likely scenario in any state? We enter 2025 with a lot of uncertainty around the sweeps industry. But neither of the two extremes — a widespread crackdown and the status quo — seem likely. Meanwhile, a sweeps trade group put together a code of conduct that aims to lessen the need for regulatory intervention. We’ll likely get some pushback around the country next year. The only question is if it will be enough to disrupt an industry that has a hundred or more operators serving much of the United States.Are you interested in unlocking new revenue streams and acquisition/retention funnels with skill games? Toast is building real-money, real-time, peer-to-peer strategy games for companies in the US market and the rest of the world. Learn more at Toast's website or email connect@playtoast.com.
NJ online casinos set another record | New Jersey set a new record for online gambling for the second straight month at $214 million in revenue in November. More from The Associated Press.
Reading the line: If you look at the amount of money that online casinos in New Jersey (and elsewhere in the US) generate, you should be seeing the future of gambling. That — alongside how much money flows through online social, sweeps, sportsbooks, fantasy pick’em etc. platforms — should be an indicator that trying to artificially keep all gambling in a retail setting is a fool’s errand in the long term. And if you want to make the argument that online casino is slowing Atlantic City growth/hurting AC in parallel, I think you have to squint… land-based casino revenue was flat over pre-pandemic numbers, per the AP.Riot Games eyes gambling category | Riot — the publisher of games like League of Legends and Valorant — wants to look into gambling as a sponsorship category. More from Esports Advocate.
Reading the line: People will try to be mad about this. I was thinking about being mad about it, but I really can’t. While we still equate esports/video games to a thing that kids play, the reality is it’s a massive market that includes many people over 21. (The writer of this newsletter still fires up a PlayStation 5 regularly). League of Legends started as a game mostly for kids; as it has aged, a vast majority of the audience is of gambling age. So a gambling sponsor is no more scandalous than any league or team in any sport partnering with a sportsbook or other gambling site. There are still potential pitfalls, however. Top of mind is match-fixing, which arguably remains more of a problem — for esports writ large and Riot in particular — than it does for traditional sports. In the United States, esports betting remains largely an afterthought in the regulated market.
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Quick hitters
A thing I wrote about ESPN PR pumping a TV personality’s betting results appeared at Awful Announcing.
VGW’s sweepstakes poker site, Global Poker, is exiting Nevada.
The National Council on Problem Gambling reports a lot of support for its efforts to “spotlight the risks associated with purchasing lottery tickets for children.”
Nine people are arrested in relation to an illegal gambling operation in Georgia.
The site RG dot org (I’ll be damned if I link it) using responsible gambling as an entry point to gambling affiliation is one of the grosser things I’ve come across in our industry. I saw a link to the page below bought on a news site. It’s one thing to do RG content as an affiliate; I’d argue it’s another to make your entire brand about RG when the main goal is to sign people up for sportsbook apps.
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