Why 2025 Marked a Turning Point for iGaming and Atlantic City

Last year will go down as a watershed year in the history of iGaming. Online gaming in New Jersey finally surpassed the amount won from Atlantic City’s land-based Boardwalk casinos, one of the nation’s largest retail casino markets. And while it was very close, with iGaming notching $2.91 billion compared to land-based efforts of $2.88 billion, it was online’s continuing red-hot growth that put it over the top for the year, with a 19.8% improvement this December versus last year, while brick-and-mortar casinos lagged December 2024 numbers by 6.7%.

Those land-based casinos did see an overall improvement of 2.7% for the entire year, but that pales in comparison with the 22% surge for their internet counterparts. Sports betting also had a good year, up 7.5% annually and raking in an additional $1.18 billion. This added up to a record $6.98 billion in total revenue from all gaming sources, eclipsing last year’s previous record of $6.3 billion by slightly more than 10% — a banner year considering the economy and job market.

Digital Goliaths

Despite the sometimes breathless headlines about rapid growth in iGaming, it’s important to realize just how consolidated these markets are, and how that trend continues year over year.

Last year hit the smaller Garden State operators even harder than usual as a new tax rate on iGaming took effect on July 1, boosting the effective rate from 15% to 19.75%, nearly a third higher. This tax is applied to gross revenue, so smaller operators relying on free play and incentives to stay competitive now find themselves paying much higher taxes even on marketing spend.

Of the almost thirty iGaming operators in the state, Jackpot City and Spin Place shut their doors in 2025. Another eight operators actually lost revenue for the year, and five more posted gains under 10%. More than two-thirds of the total market is in the hands of just three operators — or perhaps three and a half, depending on how you look at it.

FanDuel Casino took over as market leader in 2025, posting revenue of $655 million for the year, up 29% from the previous year. DraftKings fell to second place with $569 million and a rather moribund 10% increase. BetMGM and Borgata, owned through a joint venture between MGM and Entain, were number three and four. BetMGM posted $376 million in revenue with 30% year-over-year growth, while Borgata delivered $252 million and grew by 12%.

800 Reasons to Worry

It was much the same story in land-based casinos, though perhaps even more pronounced. Borgata dwarfs the rest of the competition with 2025 revenue of $800 million. It grew that number by 8.5% last year, mainly by increasing table-games drop by 11%. Ocean Casino pulled the same trick with a whopping 39% gain in table-games revenue, giving it $468 million in total revenue for the year and third place overall. Number-two Hard Rock, however, saw flat table-games and slots revenue year over year and came in at $550 million. Harrah’s was flat, and the other five properties lost revenue on the year, which somewhat belies the record-breaking premise of prosperity across the board.

The table-games segment is crucial, as slot revenue for the nine casinos was only up 1.7% on the year, so any blow to table revenue would have been hard to absorb. Yet New York, just a couple of hours away from the Boardwalk, finally issued its long-awaited downstate licenses earlier this month. Both Hard Rock in Queens and Bally’s in the Bronx are several years from opening (more likely five), but Resorts World, which had been operating thousands of VLTs at a racino in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, was also awarded a license.

They will be able to convert those VLTs quickly to Class III slots, but the existential danger for Atlantic City is that they will be adding up to 800 table games eventually — many hundreds of them by the end of March 2026. Total tables across all nine Boardwalk properties currently sit at just over 1,100.

What that sort of supply shock in a major feeder market for the resort town might mean is the subject of intense debate. But if you are Golden Nugget, which lost 22% of its table-games play last year; Caesars, which lost 14%; or Resorts and the Trop, which also lost over 10% — all before this even happens — you are probably staying up nights waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Conclusion

What this year in New Jersey shows is that iGaming’s future isn’t just theoretical. It’s no longer incremental. It’s here now, and it represents a structural change. Digital is consolidating faster than most believed possible, while pulling more and more of the pie toward just a handful of dominant platforms. This leaves smaller online operators and marginal land-based properties vulnerable not only to competition, but also to higher tax rates from Trenton.

At the same time, a far more immediate threat is coming in just a few short months from across the Hudson, where we will soon see one of the most massive expansions of table-games supply in history, right in the heart of Atlantic City’s most important market.

Whether all of Atlantic City’s land-based casinos or New Jersey’s online casinos will survive this one-two punch is uncertain. What we can say is that the next phase of iGaming and brick-and-mortar retail casinos will be defined by consolidation and some hard decisions about where to deploy capital, labor, and technology.

Last year may have been a record-revenue year, but 2026 is shaping up to be the year of tough choices.