As more and more markets legalize online casinos in Europe, it is being reflected in the number of users. The last study coming out at the end of 2019, showed an 11% growth of the industry, in 2018. From what we can tell right now, thanks to new technology developments and trends, this number is bound to keep growing for many years to come.

A Market Enlarged by the Arrival of New Technologies

The European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) in partnership with H2 Gambling Capital, came out with a report in December 2019 showing that Europe’s online gambling market grew by 11%. That number represents 16.5 million active customers who are using one of the online casinos, members of the EGBA. They spent, on the whole of the year, 5.41 billion euros in online gambling. The UK market remains number one with more than 34% of the players being from its territory. This of course will change in 2020 since the UK has left Europe recently.

But this is not the only change this industry will see, and its growth should continue as it adds new technologies to attract new customers, namely virtual reality games as well as live dealers, which is a speciality you can find at Betiton.

In fact, the arrival of live dealers inside online casinos has already seen new players joining in. There was always a resistance from a portion of casino-goers to random number generators being used on the online platforms. Now, with a dealer they can talk to, and actual cards, dices and a roulette turning in front of their eyes, they are joining the clientele of already crowded online casinos.

Gambling per Category and Devices Used to Make Bets

It’s interesting to notice that sports’ betting was the most popular online gambling activity with 42.5% of the total EU market share. With a professional sports’ world currently on pause, because of the coronavirus, it will be interesting to see where that money will go, if spent in the gambling industry. After that category, casino games came in at 32.4%, and then lottery at 12.6%, poker at 5%, bingo at 4.3%, with the rest of the games sharing a 3.2% market.

Also worth noting, more than half of the bets came from a desktop computer (57%), while the rest (43%) came from phones and tablets. These two gained in popularity by 4% from 2017, which we can presume is indicating a shift towards the use of mobile devices in the years to come.