If you have a gaming company with operations in Denmark, chances are you are probably doing quite well on the financial side of things.
That is, unless your operations deal solely or mainly in the game of poker.
Figures released by the Danish Gambling Authority (DGA) have shown that gross gaming online poker revenues in the Scandinavian country have fallen in the second quarter of this year. Danish poker revenues in Q2 totalled around $8.9 million, a drop from the $9.8 million in poker revenues during the same time in 2012.
That does not seem like a huge decline at first glance – it is a little over 9 percent – but it is a major fall when put into the context of full year projections for gross poker revenue in Denmark.
The DGA has put forward its expectations that poker revenue for this year will total around $36.3 million. If that figure proves to be correct, it would be a drop of over two and a half million dollars from 2012 revenue totals.
The projected decline is even more significant given that other forms of online gaming in Denmark have increased over the same period. Gross online casino revenues in the country, for example, increased from around $41.5 million to $44.3 million in the second quarter of this year.
Online sports revenues, on the other hand, jumped from $46.9 million to $59.2 million in Q2, an increase of 26 percent year-on-year. Those figures helped contribute to a 17 percent increase in total online gaming revenues in Denmark in the last quarter, an obviously positive event for that country’s online gaming industry.
Still though, it does make one question why poker revenues have gone the other way while the country’s online gaming industry seems to be growing in strength. One possible reason could lie in the existence of an online gaming blacklist in the country, which contains a number of sites and operators.
The list is not exhaustive, however, especially when compared to those of other European countries such as Italy, Bulgaria, Belgium and Greece, and many online poker sites operate in the country.
Another possible - and more likely - reason for the declining poker fortunes in Denmark is that the country has been caught up in what seems to be a trend away from the game. Denmark is certainly not the only country to have had declining gross poker revenue in recent months; a number of other countries, including France and Italy, have also experienced falls in online poker revenue while other forms of online gaming have increased.
Such trends do not necessarily mean that the game of poker is in danger in countries such as Denmark. Poker has been extremely popular in many countries around the world for a number of years, having achieved mainstream success and having attracted huge numbers of followers along with it.
Now, for whatever reason, it appears that some of those casual followers are either steering away from poker or paying less attention to it. That is the case with most things that suddenly gain major amounts of attention; it becomes fashionable for some followers who stop playing the game almost as quickly as they’ve adopted it.
It is likely not a case of poker entering bad times, more that times are still good, but no longer fantastic, for poker in Denmark and beyond.
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