One chain, many shapes
The layers in lesson one exist everywhere, but their relative size, the contracts between them and the companies that fill them differ by region and by product. An account manager moving from a European operator to a US one, or from casino to sports, meets a chain with the same names and different weights. This lesson sets out the main variations.
The United States
The defining feature is market access. Every state with online casino, and many with online sports betting, ties online licences to land-based licence holders (casinos, racetracks, tribes, state lotteries, sometimes sports arenas), so a layer exists in the US that barely exists elsewhere: the access provider, which sells "skins" to online operators for fees and revenue share. The number of skins is set state by state: in online casino, New Jersey allows each licensee five and Pennsylvania sets no cap. Operators without land-based estates bought access at prices that shaped the early market; operators with estates used their own.
The second feature is state-by-state everything: licences, certification, servers (New Jersey, for example, requires the equipment that runs online gaming to be located in Atlantic City), geolocation (mandatory, checked at log-in and repeatedly during play), and tax rates on revenue from 6.75% on sports betting in Nevada and Iowa to more than half: 51% on online sports betting in New York, a top rate of 52.25% in Illinois, and 54% on online slots in Pennsylvania and 62.45% in Rhode Island. Suppliers certify per state; platforms deploy per state; a studio's addressable US market is the states it has cleared.
The third is the product mix: at the end of 2025 sports betting was legal in 39 states plus the District of Columbia and full online casino in seven, with Nevada limited to online poker and Maine legalising online casino in early 2026 without yet having a live market, so the US chain is sports-led, in-play and parlay-heavy, with the profit concentrated in the casino states. The data companies with league rights are more powerful here than anywhere, because several states, among them Illinois, Michigan and New York, have official league data mandates, and the leagues have monetised them.
The fourth is prediction markets: a competitor to the operator layer operating as exchanges regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission rather than under state gambling licences, a jurisdiction the CFTC says is exclusive and several states are contesting in court, and a new customer for the data layer.
Europe
Point-of-consumption licensing per country, so a multi-market operator holds a licence in each and suppliers certify per country. The chain is mature: platforms, aggregators, studios and data companies are established, contracts are standardised, and the relationships are years old. Casino is a larger share than in the US: in Great Britain online casino games produced £5.7 billion of the £8.3 billion remote gross gambling yield in 2025/26, while in the US commercial sports betting revenue of $16.89 billion in 2025 exceeded the $10.73 billion from online casino. Live casino is large, although Evolution, a leading supplier, reported flat revenue for 2025 and, in the fourth quarter, weak development in Europe, which it attributed to regulatory changes. Sports is football-led: football was the largest British remote betting market in 2025/26, at £1.2 billion.
Variations within Europe: the Nordics have strong local operators and are home to many studios and live casino suppliers, among them Evolution, whose parent company is based in Sweden; the UK is a large, long-established regulated market with a well-developed affiliate layer and tightly regulated marketing; Italy runs a concession-based regime for public gaming, while Spain licenses operators with a ten-year general licence plus singular licences for each type of game, and taxes online betting and gaming at 20% of net revenue; Germany's turnover tax, 5.3% of stakes on virtual slots and the same rate on online poker and sports bets, reshaped the product mix toward whatever survives it; the licensing hubs (Malta, Gibraltar, Isle of Man) host the suppliers and the operators' group companies rather than their customers.
Latin America
A chain forming in real time. Brazil's regulated launch created a local supply layer overnight: platforms, aggregators and studios certified for Brazil, payment orchestrators built on Pix, and identity checks that the law requires to use facial recognition. Local partners (media, retail, land-based operators) are a layer of their own, because licensing conditions and market knowledge favour them: an operator must be a company incorporated and run in Brazil, with a Brazilian partner holding at least 20% of its capital. Sports is the door, football the product, and the marketing layer is football sponsorship and influencers under tightening rules. The Latin America Market Entry course covers it.
Asia-Pacific
Australia is a wagering market (sports and racing) with strong domestic operators, a lottery business of unusual scale (The Lottery Corporation reported A$3.58 billion of revenue in the year to June 2026), and point-of-consumption taxes by state (Victoria, for example, taxes net wagering revenue from bets placed by Victorian customers); online casino is prohibited under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001. New Zealand's Online Casino Gambling Act 2026 creates a licensed online casino market, with the right to apply for a licence allocated by auction and the regime not expected to be fully operational until 2027. Much of Asia is unregulated or prohibited, served by Asian-facing operators licensed offshore (the Philippines, long a major base, ordered its offshore gaming licensees to cease operations by 31 December 2024), with a chain that is large, opaque, baccarat- and live-casino-led, and served by suppliers that specialise in it. India's 28% GST on the amounts players deposit, which the GST Council set to apply from 1 October 2023, reshaped its real-money gaming chain, and the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 then prohibited online money games outright.
Africa
Mobile money is the payment layer and the telcos are gatekeepers; the operator layer is dominated by local and regional brands; sports betting on European football is the product; the supplier layer is international platforms and content adapted for low-bandwidth mobile. The iGaming in Africa guide covers it.
By product
Sports betting. The chain is data-heavy: league rights, feeds, odds, trading. The sportsbook supplier or the in-house trading team is the critical layer; content suppliers barely feature. Margins are thin on singles and thick on parlays; the marketing layer runs on the sporting calendar.
Casino. The chain is content-heavy: studios, aggregators, live casino. The platform's game lobby and promotion tools decide which suppliers earn. Margins are set by RTP and are predictable; marketing runs on bonuses where permitted.
Poker. Liquidity is the product, so the chain concentrates in a few networks that pool players across operators, with the network operator taking the rake and paying skins a share. A small layer, although six US states have approved multistate poker, which pools players across state lines.
Lottery. State monopolies or concessions at the operator layer, specialist technology suppliers (lottery systems, iLottery platforms), and a distribution layer of retail terminals and online brokers. Large, slow-moving, and increasingly online: in Australia, digital sales reached 46.6% of The Lottery Corporation's lottery turnover (excluding products not sold digitally) in the year to June 2026.
Bingo and instant win. Network products with a few specialist suppliers, strong in particular markets.
Prediction markets. Exchange operators under financial regulation, market makers as liquidity providers, and the same data layer as sports betting.
What the variations mean in practice
A supplier's growth plan is a list of regions and products it is not yet in, each with its own certification, contracts and competitors. An operator's supplier list is different in each market it serves. A deal that makes sense in one region (a sportsbook supplier buying a data company) makes no sense in another. And the state's share of the chain, through tax and licence design, differs enough by region that the same operator's margin can be double in one market what it is in the next. The final lesson looks at how companies move across the layers to change where they sit.