It’s no secret that online gaming is a huge market worldwide. More and more games are coming with payment options or subscription models, and it has turned into an incredibly lucrative business. All the kids who grew up playing video games in the 80s and 90s are now fully grown adults with money to spend, and video game companies are taking advantage of that fact.
The online revenue collected by online gaming companies has skyrocketed in the past five years. In 2017, Canadians spent a total of $183.3 million USD on online gaming, and in 2022 that has increased to $322.4 million! That number is projected to keep growing over the coming years, with projections that the number will reach $455 million by the end of 2027. This isn’t just happening in Canada; worldwide spending on online games has dramatically increased, with China spending $3.384 billion USD in 2017 and now spending $6.309 billion so far in 2022.
The main players in the Canadian online gaming market are Activision Blizzard, creators of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, and owners of the Call of Duty and Starcraft franchises. Another major player is Electronic Arts, creators of the Fifa, Madden, and NBA game franchises, a company that has seen a net revenue growth of 24% in 2022 alone.
However, it’s not just video games that are increasingly popular with Canadians; online casinos are seeing a similar increase in revenue. It’s an exciting time for Canada’s online gaming industry. Ontario’s new legal online betting market has firmly established itself as a competitor to offshore sites, creating even more choices for Canadian players. The more competition there is between brands, the bigger the benefit to Canadians, as they’ll compete to offer more features, better bonuses, and bigger welcome offers to try and become of the best Canadian casinos. Canada currently ranks eighth in the world for most money spent on gambling, with a reported $4 billion USD spent every year!
Even though we’ve already seen a dramatic increase in spending over the past five years, it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down anytime soon. Projections show that spending in this sector will continue to increase at a steady rate over the next five years and will likely continue into the future.
