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

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