Beginning in September of this year, online slot games in Great Britain will operating with a £5 ($6.24 USD) maximum stake for players 25 and £2 ($2.54 USD) for players between the ages of 18-24. It’s a landmark moment for the British gaming industry as regulators take bold action on the threat of online gambling addiction.
The new maximum stakes for online slots is one of the most significant results of the gambling white paper released by the British government last year. It’s predicted that this one move alone will cost British online gambling operators somewhere around £170 million ($215 million USD) a year in lost revenue.
Gambling Minister Stuart Andrew defended the action against problem gambling in a comments reported on by the Guardian saying, “Although millions of people gamble safely every single day, the evidence shows that there is a significantly higher problem gambling rate for online slot games.”
“We also know that young adults can be more vulnerable when it comes to gambling-related harms, which is why we committed to addressing both of these issues in our white paper. The growing popularity of online gambling is clear to see, so this announcement will level the playing field with the land-based sector and is the next step in a host of measures being introduced this year that will protect people from gambling harms,” he added.
The British government predicts that the measures will cost the industry about 1.5 percent of its total annual revenue. They justify that loss by citing the £4 billion ($5 billion USD) that British players lost to the gaming industry last year alone.