Many US online casinos do not accept residents of states that have legalized online casinos as well as states that have banned online casinos. However, there are a few reputed sites that accept players from all 50 US states. Software Platform – Ideally, an online casino must offer three gaming options—download, instant play, and mobile. New Online Casinos for US Players. We are always on the lookout for new online casinos for USA players. When we find one, we jump in to start testing it out. Before posting a review, our experts go to the site, make a deposit, play games, and request a payout. Below is the most recent casino site that we recommend to US Players. To manage the data, online casino operators will also need to maintain servers. All this comes to a ballpark figure of 20,000USD a month. Because online casinos have lower overheads, they are able to. Online slots have much higher payouts (higher return to player; rtp) than Las Vegas Strip casinos. Generally, you will get a 90 percent rtp for an online casino, as opposed to just 75 to 90 percent on the Vegas Strip.

If you’re entertaining dreams of owning your own casino one day, you’ll need anywhere from a few thousand dollars to a few billion.

The casino business is so lucrative that every time a new casino opens as “the most expensive casino ever built,” investors pop champagne bottles and raise a toast. It wasn’t always that way. Only a few decades ago, casino operators built on slim budgets.

Steve Wynn gambled big in the late ‘80s when he opened The Mirage in Las Vegas. Wynn and his backers invested an unheard-of $630 million in the new casino. At the time, industry analysts calculated the casino would have to turn an average daily profit of at least $1 million to meet its financial obligations.

In 2019 dollars, that isn’t so bad. If a casino has only 1,000 gaming machines, it can turn a $5 million daily profit just by retaining an average $1000 per machine.

According to a 2015 Las Vegas Sun article, about 40 million people visited Las Vegas on an annual basis at that time. That works out to nearly 110,000 visitors to Las Vegas daily. There are just over 100 casinos in Las Vegas.

In 2017, it was then reported that annual visitors had climbed to more than 42 million.

If each visitor loses only an average of $100 per day, Las Vegas is raking in $11 million in casino earnings every day. The reality is much more startling.

In 2013, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas published a study on the daily revenues of the 23 big casinos on the Strip. To be included in the study, a casino had to produce gaming revenue at least $72 million a year. The average for each of the big 23 turned out to be over $230 million per year.

That’s a far cry since The Mirage opened in 1989, but competition has changed the city’s gaming industry. Here is a deeper look at what it costs to build a casino.

Location, Location, Location

If you want to build a casino for as little as possible, buy cheap land. Where that wicket becomes sticky is in finding the right land. Not only do you need favorable laws allowing gambling and zoning for casinos, but you also need at least a good nearby highway.

Las Vegas is a hub for three Interstate highways and several US highways. The city is also home to McCarran International Airport. About 40 million passengers pass through the airport every year.

Considering AmTrak carries passengers to the city as well, tourists visit the city by car, bus, train, and plane.

If you decide to build your own casino, lacking the transportation channels that Las Vegas boasts means your location will attract fewer annual visitors. This probably explains why few cities dominate the casino industry. The casinos need both good zoning and access to transportation to attract visitors.

Hence, you should expect to pay a lot of money for the land.

Size Counts In Every Way

The Mirage currently boasts about 2,000 slot machine games. While that sounds like a lot, the WinStar World Casino in Thackerville, OK has about six times the floor space as The Mirage. The WinStar opened in 2003, making it 14 years younger than The Mirage.

According to their website in 2019, the WinStar holds about 8400 slot machines. They also have a 55-table poker room, all squeezed into 400,000 feet of floor space. If you want to compete with the WinStar, you’ll need a lot of floor space and thousands of more games.

The casino is owned and operated by the Chickasaw Nation, who had plenty of available land for development. That’s an advantage over the average commercial developer. By owning the land as part of their reservation, they were able to invest more in creating a high-quality resort.

You Need a Hotel and Restaurant

One reason why good casinos cost so much to build is the bigger casinos contain or are paired with big hotels. By providing their visitors with safe, comfortable accommodations, they ensure those visitors spend more time in their gaming areas.

On-site entertainment and dining venues enhance the hotel and casino experience. The farther away from Vegas and Atlantic City one gets in the United States, the less extravagant the casinos tend to become.

Only a handful of states and cities allow commercial casinos to congregate in their jurisdictions. The demand for suitable land limits the competition.

Biloxi, MS is North America’s third big commercial casino hub.

The Beau Rivage may be the best known of the Biloxi casinos. They only offer about 1800 slot games. Owned by MGM Resorts, Beau Rivage promotes its hotel, entertainment, dining, and nightlife venues equally with the casino.

These are not afterthoughts. They are part and parcel major pieces of the whole package.

According to Fixr.com, the average cost of a hotel in the United States is just over $22 million. A hotel comparable to the resorts at WinStar or Beau Rivage will easily set you back in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Factor in the Cost of Games

How Much Money Did Online Casinos Make

Assuming the hypothetical new casino brings in a lot of slot machines, how much do they cost?

The website HowMuchIsIt.org rounds up a list of price ranges for popular slot machines. Expect to pay at least several thousand dollars per basic game. The enhanced games may run $30,000 or more for the consoles.

If you can bring enough people in, the games should pay for themselves in only a few months. That’s not so bad.

However, the games will need to be maintained. A new casino must include the cost of hiring qualified staff or for paying authorized service contracts.

Plant Operations Are Expensive

Whether you’re building a roadside casino with 100 machines or planning a massive resort with more than a handful of casino games, the buildings will need electricity, water, heating and air systems, sewage, and maintenance areas.

Assuming a modest 200-room hotel is built on the property, it will have its own plant facility. Ditto for a small restaurant.

This new casino will need tools and equipment no one thinks about when pushing buttons and counting cards. There are lighting systems, sound systems, security systems, communication systems, and staff offices.

Employees will need dressing rooms and lockers, or at least their own break room.

Administration will need at least one office, maybe two if there is a dedicated full-time security team.

The cashiers will need a counting room and vault.

All these facilities must be built out, equipped, and brought online. This is all before you hire your first employee.

Conclusion

If the idea of building a new casino seems crazy, it is. This is an industry for billionaires and rich investment fund managers to play in. It’s not for the faint-hearted or small business person.

It’s true there are hundreds of small casinos that do just fine. With only a few dozen to a few hundred games, they cater to local customers. They don’t need big highways, trains, and airports.

Even so, the cost of setting up a small commercial will run into the millions of dollars. Most communities won’t accept commercial casinos. Most states don’t license them. The Native American tribes may contract with casino management companies but only the big ones.

In short, it costs a lot of money to open a casino. Buying one is out of the question for most people. Donald Trump is believed to have lost about $1 billion in investors’ money by trying to buy his way into Atlantic City.

How Do Casinos Make Money

Short of inheriting a small fortune or casino, this kind of development is one game well beyond the reach of typical investors and small business owners.

The casino industry has always been big business. The decadent resorts of Las Vegas alone are testament to this. Even the fact that there is a city in the middle of the Nevada desert is a dead giveaway to the long-term profitability of operating a casino.

Each year the biggest gambling companies take literally billions in revenue. Their profits are technically winnings, since each bet they receive has a chance to take money from them. However, casino operators aren’t usually worried about going broke to a lengthy period of bad luck. When taken at the hand-by-hand level, the phrase “the house always wins” isn’t exactly true. However, when you consider a casino’s profits over the course of a year, a month, or even a week, it’s clear that it’s not the players who are consistently winning.

If land-based casinos are profitable, online casinos are literal goldmines. Whereas the former requires staffing, premises, equipment, and other overheads, many of these facets of operating a gambling venue are taken care of by software in the online casino. This means even greater profits.

The Secret’s in the Games

You see, almost every game in the casino, whether online or real-world, has what’s known as a house edge. This essentially means that the probability of the player winning is always lower than the probability of the house winning.

Many people wrongly assume that they have just as much chance of winning as they do of losing at a casino. If this was the case, the industry wouldn’t be worth anything like what it is today. In reality, each game has been carefully designed to give the casino (the house) a higher likelihood of winning over the long term.

The easiest way to explain this is with a game of European roulette. In European roulette there are 37 numbers (0-36). This means the probability of the ball landing on any one specific number is 36 to one. In other words, if you bet on a single number 37 times, your number is expected to come up once.

If you were to use £1 bets in the above example, the casino would pay you out at 35 to one when you won. You would take your £1 back and receive £35 as winnings. Over the course of the 37 spins, you would have bet £37 and taken £36 back from the casino. The extra £1 is the casino’s profit.

Let’s consider a second example. Say you bet on only either black or red. The casino would pay you at one to one for a winner (you take back your stake and receive the same amount in winnings too). If there were no house edge whatsoever, the probability of you hitting red or black should also be 50 percent. However, it’s not. The fact that there is a green number on the wheel (or two green numbers in American roulette) means that the odds are in fact just under 50%. The “0” and “00” sections of the wheel represent the house’s edge.

Thanks to the house edge, it’s mathematically impossible for the player to profit long-term from casino games. Even if you do beat the casino, the house doesn’t care. For you, the game is against a single opponent – the house. For the casino it’s about every single player than walks through the door. Just like in poker, the player playing with the most favourable odds will occasionally lose but with enough gameplay (casinos get a lot of gameplay), their edge will emerge.

Although the above example details roulette, each game at both online and land-based casinos will have a house edge. One exception is poker, where players play against one another rather than the house. Here, the casino takes a tournament fee or a “rake” off each pot to ensure profitability.

Online Casinos Expenses

As mentioned, online casino expenses are typically far lower than they would be at a land-based casino. There is no lavish building, complete with decadent furnishings to finance, and games don’t require human dealers. The online casino operator doesn’t need a liquor licence and doesn’t require the same level of physical security as a brick-and-mortar venue either.

That said, online casinos aren’t free to operate. Servers need hosting, licences obtaining, and software deals need financing. All of this is very expensive.

Another huge expense for online casinos that is less relevant to land-based operators is marketing. Most land-based casinos rely on their presence to attract punters. It’s there and so are you. If you like gambling, you might attend the casino. Sure, they do have some marketing budget but the sheer lack of competition in an area means it’s minimal.

Compare this to an online casino. Online, you can visit any number of different venues within a few seconds of one another. It’s, therefore, important that online casinos spend money standing out from the crowd. They do this in a few ways. One is conventional or online advertising – TV or newspaper ads, and popups, etc.

Another is by offering all sorts of bonuses as an incentive for people to play. The casino will reduce the overall cost of offering such promotions using wagering requirements but they still cost money. Occasionally a player will win big from a bonus, yet for the number of new players they attract, it’s a necessary cost for a successful iGaming operation.

The Bottom Line

It’s very difficult to say exactly how much different online casinos make. For one, most online casinos are not publicly listed. They’re under no obligation to report income and expenditure. Complicating matters further is the fact that many of the largest casinos will also have sportsbooks. Bet365 reports a profit of around $896 million for 2018/19 yet does not detail what percentage of this is from the casino alone.

Do Online Casinos Make Money

One thing is for sure though, operating an online casino is a highly profitable line of business. The iGaming industry alone was worth a staggering $40 billion in 2018. Several of the most profitable companies in the industry also either provide games for online casinos or actually operate casino games themselves. Examples include Playtech, 888, Holdings, Paddy Power BetFair, and GVC Holdings PLC.

How Much Money Do Casinos Make

Of course, not all online casinos will boast the kind of player counts as the likes of Bet365, Ladbrokes, and William Hill. For these smaller venues, it’s even more difficult to tell just how much profits they make. However, thanks to the tried and tested business model of offering games with a real chance to win, but that favour the casino, it’s safe to say that the online casino industry is suitably lucrative for those operating within it.