In the United Kingdom, online gambling is legal and exclusively regulated by the government authority UK Gambling Commission (UKGC). If an online operator wants to offer real-money games to players residing in the UK, then it has to get approved and licensed by the commission. As of today, there are over 420 remote gambling operators in the UK which hold over 700 activity licenses. For the last year, the gross gambling yield generated from online gambling operators in the UK alone was over £1400m, over £800m of which were generated from casino games (the rest is distributed between betting and bingo as follows: £500m+ for betting and £80m+ for bingo).
As for the biggest names on the online casino market, more often than not they come from the betting world. The hands-down biggest gambling operator in the UK, both online and offline, is William Hill. This is also the oldest company on the market, having been founded in 1934, and today it is worth an estimated 5.17 billion dollars. Their casino is hugely popular in the UK, it features the game collection of the biggest software house in the industry, Playtech, and has even won the prestigious EGR ‘Best Online Casino 2015’ Award. The other big fish in the pond are, again, betting operators that also have casino sections: Paddy Power, Betfair, Bwin and more. One big operator that isn’t primarily a bookmaker but a casino is 888. This operator is actually considered by many to be the best online casino in the United Kingdom.
Sure enough, the above-mentioned operator worth billions of dollar and generate millions in revenue on a yearly basis, but the fact to the matter is that they don’t develop their own games and software (with a couple of exceptions), but rather pay for the products developed by external companies. I already mentioned the biggest one, Playtech, which today is worth over three billion dollars and is the casino software supplier of a huge percentage of online casinos. The other big software house which offers whole software platform is Microgaming while in the live-development field Evolution Gaming are the ones to watch out for.
A big name in the casino development field is also NetEnt (worth over 1 billion dollars). This provider won itself a spot among the biggest companies in the casino gaming field not by offering all types of products and solutions, but rather focusing on only one – the games. They truly offer the hands-down best games in the field which also have the best mobile versions.
Speaking of mobile this is an aspect of online casinos that is getting more and more important as more and more players prefer to play on the go. As of today, absolutely every online casino has a mobile-friendly version but, of course, not all are all that great or feature enough games. Still, this is a very long topic to discuss so I plan on tackling it in a separate article which you can expect to be published sometime next week.