/ THE BRIEFING / NEWS
NO
YES
THE BIG DEBATE
THIS MONTH, WE ASK:
HAS NEW JERSEY’S ONLINE GAMING MARKET
BEEN A SUCCESS SO FAR?
SENATOR RAYMOND LESNIAK
JIM RYAN
State of New Jersey
CEO, Pala Interactive
N
ew Jersey is absolutely a success. You can
only possibly answer this
question if you have been to
the state.
If you have gone to New
Jersey, you will realise that
signing onto online poker
and casino sites is still very
difficult. And that’s down
to geolocation issues and
payment issues.
The geolocation controls
have been set very tightly,
but now the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement
(DGE) is starting to loosen
them up. Furthermore, US
credit card companies aren’t
used to the idea of regulated
gaming yet, but now that’s
coming along. We’ve seen
Neteller enter the market and
we’re going to see Paypal
soon too, so the payment
processing is going to become easier.
Nobody can argue the
market has failed until the
player journey has been
improved through these
measures. It’s way too early
W W W. E G R M A G A Z I N E . C O M
to call this one. You have to
understand the perimeters
that have been set on the
operators to date.
It’s a $120-130m market
at this point in time and, in
my humble opinion, that will
double once it is easier to
be geolocated and to get
payments in there.
New Jersey has also got
a very commercial regulator
[DGE director Dave Rebuck]
who is moving conservatively
forward with a view to increasing the size of the online
gaming market. I think it will
continue to grow and be far
more successful.
I think [April’s decrease in
egaming revenues] suffered
from seasonality issues. It
has been a long hard winter
in that part of the world and
after Easter it started to
warm up and people started
to go outside.
No one should judge the
market based on what’s
going to happen in the next
couple of months. It is still a
very exciting opportunity.
I
t hasn’t been a success by
the standards that we set
up and that we expected.
On the plus side, regulated
online gaming has prevented
casinos from closing and
saved thousands of jobs,
aside from the [now defunct]
Atlantic C