Home / Poker News January 2014 / France’s Withering Online Poker Industry
France’s Withering Online Poker Industry
Posted by: Jo Martin - Thu, 2014-01-16 12:35
Sure, it seemed like a good idea at the time: lock all the unlicensed online poker companies out of the country, lock everyone else out too and let the French duke it out among themselves at the virtual green felt of a couple of online poker sites hand-picked by the French authorities. The realities of the lack of competition and a free online poker market seem to have caught up with the French poker industry though. Despite the size of the country, and despite the relatively large number of players interested in the
online poker games, the loss of diversity turned out to be something the French online poker ecosystem could simply not digest.
French online gaming didn’t do particularly well in 2012 and according to French gaming regulator ARJEL, 2013 was even less kind to online gaming revenues. The drop seen in 2013 was a massive 13% in online poker revenues and that definitely doesn’t bode well for the future of the already besieged industry.
ARJEL has been calling for the laws – which currently only allow two operators to offer games to the French public – to be changed, for quite a while. The aim of the regulator would be to have more games allowed and to allow the French online poker industry to share player liquidity with other countries like Spain and Italy, which also have regulated markets.
Thus far however, all efforts to have the laws currently governing the French online poker industry changed have been rebuked. Only a month ago, the French National Assembly ruled against the introduction of shared liquidity. According to the Rapporteur of the Committee on Economic Affairs, Razzy Hammadi, shared liquidity would turn into a dangerous beast that would quickly spin out of the control of the regulators.
According to Alexandre Dreyfus, the owner of the Global Poker Index, that argument is quite ridiculous.
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