Marktonderzoek naar gamen en gokken

Gambling is one of the few industries that grows despite challenging economic times.

The adrenaline rush and the body’s reward system keep gamblers wanting new experiences and higher earnings for those playing for money.
But what does this mean to businesses in the industry?

Gaming and Gambling Market Research: How Operators Win in Regulated Growth Markets

Gaming and Gambling Market Research has shifted from descriptive sizing to operational intelligence that informs licensing, payments, fraud, and player lifetime value decisions. Operators expanding into Brazil, the United States, Germany, and select APAC corridors face fragmented regulation, multi-vendor fraud stacks, and player acquisition costs that compress margins inside the first two quarters of launch. The firms gaining share treat research as a continuous input into product, compliance, and risk functions rather than a pre-launch artifact.

The opportunity is concrete. Online sports betting and iGaming corridors are opening in jurisdictions that previously banned them. Sportradar, Flutter, DraftKings, Entain, and Light & Wonder are competing for entry positions in markets where local payment rails, KYC vendor selection, and responsible gambling frameworks decide who scales and who exits. The winners are the operators who built their entry thesis on primary evidence rather than secondary estimates.

What Sophisticated Gaming and Gambling Market Research Now Measures

The category has matured beyond GGR forecasts and demographic profiling. Senior decision-makers at operators, suppliers, and platform providers now demand intelligence on five operational dimensions: fraud vendor performance, payment conversion by corridor, regulatory timing risk, channel mix economics, and player segmentation by deposit behavior.

According to SIS International Research, decision-makers at gaming and gambling operators across EMEA, North America, APAC, and LATAM consistently identify fraud detection vendor diversification as a top procurement priority, with a meaningful share actively evaluating additional vendors to reduce single-provider exposure in chargeback and bonus abuse workflows. This pattern reflects a structural shift. Single-vendor fraud stacks no longer satisfy risk committees in markets where chargeback ratios, account takeover, and synthetic identity fraud each require specialized detection logic.

The practical implication for VP-level buyers: research scopes now include vendor benchmarking on false positive rates, KYC pass-through speed, and integration cost with existing player account management systems.

Regional Entry Economics Decide the Winners

Regulated markets do not behave the same way. Germany’s State Treaty on Gambling created a licensed online channel where unregulated operators previously captured the majority of gross gaming revenue, forcing licensed entrants to compete on brand trust rather than price. Brazil’s federal sports betting framework opened a corridor where local payment integration, particularly Pix, determines deposit conversion. Ontario’s iGaming model rewards operators with mature responsible gambling tooling. The United States remains a state-by-state mosaic where market entry sequencing matters more than national strategie.

SIS International’s quantitative work across operators in France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Poland, the UAE, Japan, India, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile indicates that product mix preferences vary sharply by region. North American operators concentrate on slots and online poker, while LATAM operators lean toward sports betting as the lead acquisition product. This is not cosmetic. It changes the technology stack, the affiliate economics, and the regulatory submissions an operator prioritizes.

Source: SIS International Research

The Differentiated Approach: Primary Evidence Over Secondary Sizing

Most market reports on gaming rely on syndicated revenue projections and public regulator filings. That layer is necessary but insufficient for capital allocation decisions. The operators that scale fastest run a parallel primary research track that answers questions secondary data cannot: which fraud vendors do competitors actually use, what is the realistic KYC pass rate by corridor, which affiliate partners drive depositing players versus registrations, and how do responsible gambling features affect retention at the 90-day mark.

SIS conducts B2B expert interviews with risk officers, compliance heads, and product leaders at licensed operators, supplemented by structured global surveys of decision-makers in fraud, payments, and platform roles. The output supports three decision types: market entry assessments, vendor selection for fraud and KYC stacks, and competitive intelligence on product roadmaps.

Fraud, KYC, and the Vendor Stack Question

Fraud loss has moved from a back-office cost to a board-level metric. Bonus abuse, multi-accounting, payment fraud, and account takeover require distinct detection models. The vendors competing in this space, including Sumsub, Jumio, Onfido, Sift, and SEON, each occupy different positions in the stack. Operators running primary vendor benchmarking gain a procurement advantage that secondary reports cannot replicate.

SIS International’s proprietary research in gaming and gambling indicates that operators in LATAM are more likely than peers in other regions to identify themselves as influencers of security-related decisions, suggesting that fraud and risk procurement in emerging regulated markets is decentralized and faster-moving than in mature European or North American structures. For VP-level buyers, this means LATAM vendor selection windows close faster, and research cadence needs to match.

Player Research: What CLT and Ethnographic Methods Reveal

Quantitative panels answer what players do. They rarely answer why a German player abandons a deposit at the payment screen, why a Brazilian player switches operators after a single losing session, or why a Japanese player rejects a localization that tested well in Hong Kong. Central location tests adapted for digital product evaluation, ethnographic research in player environments, and focus groups with regulated and unregulated players surface the friction points that drive churn.

Operators that combine quantitative panels with qualitative depth identify product fixes worth multiples of the research investment. The pattern holds across markets. Winning money is the dominant gambling motive in Germany, but the path to deposit, the trust signals required, and the responsible gambling messaging that retains rather than repels players are local variables that demand local fieldwork.

Building the Research Program That Scales With Expansion

A useful Gaming and Gambling Market Research program for a Fortune 500 operator or supplier covers four layers in sequence: market sizing and regulatory mapping, competitive intelligence on operator and vendor positioning, primary B2B interviews with risk and product decision-makers, and player-side qualitative work in priority corridors. Each layer informs a different capital decision. Skipping the primary layers is the most common error, and it is the one that surfaces after launch when CAC payback periods extend beyond plan.

The firms expanding successfully across the Americas, Europe, and selected APAC corridors run this program continuously, not episodically. Gaming and Gambling Market Research becomes a function, not a project.

Where the Category Heads Next

Three shifts will define the next cycle. Convergence between iGaming, sports betting, and esports betting will pressure operators to unify wallets and player accounts across products. Embedded compliance, where KYC and responsible gambling tooling sit inside the platform rather than bolted on, will become a procurement default. And primary research budgets will shift from annual studies to continuous intelligence subscriptions tied to specific operational decisions. Operators who treat Gaming and Gambling Market Research as infrastructure rather than overhead will compound the advantage.

Over SIS Internationaal

SIS Internationaal biedt kwantitatief, kwalitatief en strategisch onderzoek. Wij bieden data, tools, strategieën, rapporten en inzichten voor besluitvorming. Wij voeren ook interviews, enquêtes, focusgroepen en andere marktonderzoeksmethoden en -benaderingen uit. Neem contact met ons op voor uw volgende marktonderzoeksproject.