Outlook 2025: Slower-Paced North American Expansion Expected To Continue

January 2, 2025
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After years of multi-jurisdictional growth in the online gaming market in North America, there was very limited expansion in 2024 and that trend is expected to continue in 2025.
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After years of multi-jurisdictional growth in the online gaming market in North America, there was very limited expansion in 2024 and that trend is expected to continue in 2025.

Only one new state, Missouri, legalized sports betting in 2024, doing so through a knife-edge voter referendum, and not a single state or province moved to enact new legislation to approve online casino gaming. 

Although several major targets remain on the table for sports-betting supporters, including California and Texas, as the industry approaches its seventh year following the U.S. Supreme Court decision that opened the door for state-by-state expansion, any state that has yet to join the 40 U.S. jurisdictions in doing so has significant hurdles to clear to change the status quo.

According to new forecasts by Vixio GamblingCompliance, only Minnesota is projected to legalize sports betting in 2025 under a base-case scenario.

Minnesota lawmakers are set to resume an effort that last year saw stakeholders proclaim that they had reached an agreement to bridge a long-standing gap between Indian tribes who want exclusivity on sports betting and racetrack cardrooms that want some kind of benefit from the expansion.

A more optimistic bull-case scenario would see one of the major prizes, Texas, finally adopt betting after the state's House of Representatives voted to do so in 2023, but new legislation still faces the major and potentially insurmountable challenge of clearing the state’s Senate.

Senate President and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has consistently said that any gambling bill would only receive a vote if a majority of Republicans, which control the Senate, support the plan.

The bull-case projection also includes the approval of online betting in Mississippi, which was one of the earliest adopters of land-based sports betting in 2018, but has yet to allow online wagering except on premises at one of the state’s casinos. 

A task force comprising legislators and industry stakeholders crafted mobile sports-betting legislation in 2024 that cleared the state’s House of Representatives, but the efforts in the Senate were unsuccessful as smaller independent casinos voiced their concern over cannibalizing land-based revenues, as well as a concern that online sports betting would simply clear the way for a future online casino approval.

Some states may consider reforms to existing laws, with one area to follow being potential increases to tax rates on sports betting.

Following hikes by Ohio in 2023 and Illinois in 2024 that saw prominent operators protest, but ultimately remain in the market, other states could consider hikes of their own, particularly those who enacted single-digit percentage tax hikes and have since seen other states implement rates two to three times higher.

When it comes to online casino, the outlook for 2025 is not much brighter than in the previous year, as Vixio’s base-case scenario projects another year where no new state legalizes online casino gaming.

Clear conflicts have arisen in every state where the issue has received even preliminary conversations, including concerns from some prominent casino operators about cannibalization, as well as opposition from hotel and casino labor unions about potential job losses if such cannibalization occurs.

Those labor union concerns are especially key in states such as New York and Maryland, which are both controlled by pro-labor Democrats in both the executive and legislative branches and are unlikely to push forward with such a plan if key labor interests are opposed.

The issue is likely to be entertained by a number of states, particularly if they face a budget hole that could potentially be filled by online casino revenue. New states where the issue could receive serious consideration in 2025 include Louisiana, where a joint legislative committee held introductory hearings in December, and Colorado.

In Canada, much of the focus in 2025 will be on Alberta, where authorities are working on crafting a privatized sports betting and online gaming model that officials say will borrow heavily from the model utilized by Ontario.

Dale Nally, Alberta’s minister of service and red tape reduction who has been tasked with leading that effort, told Vixio in October that the effort would culminate with legislation being introduced in Spring 2025 and ramping up from there, after industry rumors spread that the province was looking for a speedy launch as early as 2024.

“We heard in the beginning that we can't roll this out fast enough, and once we started moving down this path, we heard, well, wait a minute, you’ve got to slow down to speed up,” Nally said during an October interview with Vixio.

“And we heard loud and clear that operators wanted to be consulted, they didn’t want us to build something and then tell them what it was going to look like."

The province currently offers regulated online gaming through the government-run PlayAlberta platform, but many prominent operators are active in the province on a grey-market basis.

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