There are so many casinos advertising all the time and inviting players to have the time of their life by using their gaming venues as a form of entertainment. Industry analysts have started begging the question of whether the gaming industry has become saturated with casinos, and wonder if there is room for more companies to join it.

The United States has one of the largest and fastest growing gaming industries in the world, and, besides the state of Texas, there aren not too many other places in the country where a player cannot take a short drive to get to a casino. Some industry analysts have concluded that it is almost impossible to find a place without a gambling venue: “New England is saturated,” said Penn National Gaming President Tim Wilmott. “The market is crowded in Ohio. It’s a little underserved in Florida.”

The main issue is the consequences this has for companies in the industry, and experts concluded that the only possible ways of growth in the casino gaming indistry will be by acquisition, mergers, and perhaps diversification. They also said that Southeast Asia is currently the best bet for new businesses to establish themselves, as countries like Japan and Korea seem to have a promising casino industry in the near future. For Europe, the experts concluded that it is already at a mature point for the casino industry, but Latin American remains an unexploited market.

Other issues that come with the saturation of the industry is the shift into the online casino industry, even though it comes with a bunch of legislative and regulatory problems that the companies must deal with. At the 2013 Global gaming Expo, industry experts did not forecast a positive outcome for federal regulation of online gambling; however, they were satisfied with the mandate that enables individual states to offer online casino gambling.

The future of the brick and mortar remains uncertain. “That’s the one thing that keeps me up at night,” they said. “Right now, what’s going to happen is as clear as mud.” Many online casino industry enterprisers believe that online gaming will generate larger customer sets for brick and mortar casinos in the near future, in the same way that tribal casinos and riverboat managed to make Las Vegas more popular than ever in the 90s. We guess we will just have to wait and see what the outcome is for the casino industry as a whole.