Is online the poker the cure for online casino’s catastrophic quarantine revenue losses? While poker may not be the savior of all online gambling operators, it’s certainly helping out the French-facing online gambling business.
According to a new report from the French gambling regulator Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), the French online poker business has more than doubled revenue since this time last year. To say that this is something of an anomaly is to understate the situation. Land-based casinos, to take just one example, saw devastating revenue drops in the range of 96-98 percent during the early phase of quarantine/lockdown. There just aren’t that many examples of revenue rising during this time period, but the French seem dead set on defying the odds. There are also no examples of any part of the gambling industry seeing a 127 percent increase over the previous year but, again, that’s what the French have managed to do.
According to a recent report on CalvinAyre.com, French gambling operators pulled in about €323 million ($385 million USD) for the period between April and June 2020. That’s down about six percent over the previous year, but pretty darned good considering the world situation during that same period.
Of course not all aspects of the French gaming industry were doing well during this period. Sports betting, not surprisingly, was down 56 percent over the previous year. That said, the sports betting market has improved nearly to pre-pandemic levels since sports were restored.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, the migration of French sports bettors to online poker seems to be a real thing that will somehow survive the pandemic. Go and figure.