iGaming Business Casino Review: An Inside Look at the Top Online Casinos and Casino Games
Published each year by iGamingBusiness with eGaming Monitor, the Casino Review tracks expansion and contraction across online gambling. The 2023 edition used information from 3,400 online casinos to identify industry trends. Here, Casino Ideal explores the report’s findings on suppliers, studios, game categories and dealmaking.
Industry at a Glance
The 2023 data from eGaming Monitor counted 744 active iGaming studios, up 18% from the previous year. The report covered 40,642 distinct casino games listed across 2,450 unique websites. Compared with 2022, this larger dataset gave analysts more information to examine trends in online casino content. It offers readers a detailed snapshot of the game selection casinos carried in 2023.
Suppliers and Studios
The number of suppliers rose by 232 from 2022 to 2023, reaching 1,637. Studios made up the largest category, at 48.9%, followed by aggregators and other platforms at 20.6%. Nearly 129 studios launched in the previous year, alongside 52 new platform providers and aggregators.
Shifting Market Shares
In 2023, the ten biggest studio groups still accounted for 55% of game placements worldwide. However, the arrival of many new providers trimmed their combined share by 1%. Evolution Gaming remained the most widely represented provider, with a 13% share across global gaming sites, slightly below its 2022 position. Playtech and Light & Wonder also lost ground, while Playson and Inspired Entertainment fell out of the top ten.
Play’n GO and Pragmatic Play grew their content reach as competition intensified. Pragmatic Play held an 11% market share, while Play’n GO had 5%. By casino coverage, Evolution Gaming and Pragmatic Play remained among the leaders. Evolution Gaming games appeared on 83% of global casino sites in 2023, making its catalogue one of the most widely distributed.
Parent-company and subsidiary structures also influenced supply. Major supplier groups provided 68% of the gaming content on casino sites in 2023, down from 70% in 2022. This reversed an earlier trend in which large groups continued to grow their share even as the number of studios increased.
The report connected this shift to an 18% year-over-year increase in studios in 2023. New entrants competed with established providers for visibility and space. As a result, familiar studios could account for a smaller share while new releases and ideas widened the available content range.
Game Supply
Casino sites worldwide recorded a 50% increase in the number of games they offered. The report linked the growth to more casinos and expanding catalogues, while older titles generally stayed on sites instead of being removed. Together, these factors increased the total number of listed games over the year.
Growth in studio output also expanded the selection on casino websites. Among active studios, average production reached 2.36 games per month in 2023. More than 10,000 new games entered the market, while a casino website featured content from an average of 59 suppliers. The report ranked the ten studio groups with the highest 2023 game production as follows:
Studio Group Games Launched in 2023 Games Global 329 Pragmatic Play 313 Evolution Gaming 303 Playtech 188 Spinomenal 181
Game Categories
Slots accounted for the largest share of games recorded across gaming sites. At online casinos, online slots made up 84.8%, far exceeding Live Casino at 6.6%. The study also found that newer formats such as crash games were gaining ground, although their share remained much smaller.
Crash games represented 0.3% of the industry in 2023, compared with 0.1% in 2022. They appeared across many gaming websites but remained much less common than slots and live games. The report also noted that crash titles often featured prominently in sections such as ‘featured’ and ‘popular’. These placements indicate operators were giving the format visibility as interest in newer game types increased.
Studio Groups by Game Placement
The report compared studio groups by counting how many sites featured each of the top casino games. Most of the top 20 spots went to Pragmatic Play, Evolution Gaming and Play’n GO. NetEnt and Red Tiger each had one title in the top 20. Pragmatic Play took the first three places with Gates of Olympus, Sweet Bonanza and Big Bass Bonanza. Slots filled most of the top 20, alongside some live games and roulette variants.
Here are a few notable titles to explore as a starting point for individual game reviews:
Emerging Themes
Branded games and Megaways titles accounted for a smaller portion of gaming content in 2023. Action & Adventure, Animals & Nature, and Tales & Legends were the leading themes by player interest. Sports and calendar-related themes saw some of the largest increases in their share of game content.
Deals and Partnerships
Among aggregators, EveryMatrix led after adding agreements with 19 studios in 2023. For distribution deals, 7777Gaming and Endorphina topped the studio rankings, each completing nine agreements in 2023. Slot titles showed a separate trend: only 11% of new slot machines reused a name from an existing game. The comparison had been 15%, which the review interprets as a move towards more original slot names over the year.
Key Findings
The iGB and eGaming Monitor review surveyed a broad range of studios and games for 2023. Its figures depict an industry that added content and formed new distribution agreements during the year. The findings offer a detailed historical snapshot of online casino catalogues and the companies supplying them; they do not establish what is available or authorised in Canada today. Use the report as background while exploring online casino reviews.
Evan Carrington brings more than 12 years of experience in the iGaming industry, with a focus on reviewing online casinos, assessing slot games and examining player safety. Their work covers casino licensing, RTP, volatility, bonus terms and withdrawal policies. Drawing on practical testing and independent research, Evan provides clear, evidence-based reviews to help players understand gambling platforms, their features and possible risks.
