Bill Miller

The American Gaming Association is more united than ever, with a diverse membership that includes gaming operators, suppliers, sports betting companies, iGaming providers and much more. Bill Miller has been leading the AGA for the last five years, and has seen the growth and reach of the industry increase each year. His “State of the Industry” address at G2E is always a highlight of the show. He spoke with GGB Publisher Roger Gros via Zoom from his office in Washington, D.C. in August.

GGB: We’re coming off a couple of record years for the commercial gaming industry following the pandemic. As we approach the end of 2024, has the revenue stream cooled off a bit?

Miller: Right after Covid, we really saw this kind of explosion. There were many prognosticators that said well, this is just pent-up demand and stimulus money, and at some point we’re going to come to a cliff. But now we’re three-plus years removed from that, still with year-on-year increases. For Q2 2024, we reached $17.3 billion, the 14th consecutive quarter annual revenue growth. But I do think that things are slowing down—there is more normalizing. Part of it is a result of the general sense of the economy and a natural return to the mean in terms of growth.

Much of that increase in revenue comes from iGaming and sports betting. Revenue from brick-and-mortar casinos has been flat or even declining a bit depending upon jurisdiction. Does this concern you?

It doesn’t concern me. I think it’s kind of a natural reflection about when new markets or new verticals are created, they tend to accelerate much faster than existing markets. We’ve got a tremendous amount of growth there with iGaming. And we haven’t seen the massive uptake in growth. But I think that during the pandemic, almost every brick-and-mortar property that had a digital property saw success with that. So I think that success has been more symbiotic than cannibalistic.

We’ve had a renewal of the debate about whether online revenues are impacting land-based gaming because we’ve had some examples where that seems to be true. The AGA opposed online gaming for years because of this very fear. Where does the organization stand on this issue?

You know our business is an iterative business.

We started off in Las Vegas with a very colorful past, and what we’ve seen is exciting growth all across the country in a number of different verticals, including iGaming. But I think one of the most important things that’s happened, as gaming has grown both in popularity and in success, has been that each jurisdiction decides for itself what amount of gaming it has and what types of gaming it has.

It would be foolhardy for us not to at least recognize that consumers are going to want to go where the consumer wants to go. There are many stakeholders and many equities in play in each of these states, and they include brick-and-mortar casinos, racetracks, labor unions, and taxes paid at different levels. And I think that all of those are really important factors to think about when and where and if iGaming moves forward.

One of the goals of legalized sports betting was to minimize the action on illegal offshore sports books. Have we accomplished that goal?

No. It’s kind of like the tale of Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, which is appropriate because the illegal market existed long before the legal, regulated marketplace in America, and pretty much everywhere else where gaming is legal now. Have we made progress on it? Absolutely. We definitely believe that we have made a dent in the illegal market, both in terms of the online offshore illegal marketplace and in sports betting specifically. In terms of the local bookie and/or organized crime, they can’t use the same playbook as they’ve used in the past. Now we have legal, regulated, taxed consumer-friendly sports betting. And we are proud that we have taken significant market share away from the illegal market.

This year is the 25th anniversary of the report issued by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. That report actually legitimatized many aspects of gaming, did the first real study on problem gambling, and turned out to be a good thing for the industry. Now with the controversies surrounding sports betting and iGaming, there have been some suggestions we need another federal study. Are you prepared to handle that should it come to pass?

There’s always some congressman that has some burr in their saddle about something. In my opinion, I look at and I care about numbers. I care about how the gaming industry is perceived, because how the gaming industry is perceived creates the threat level that we have to work under. In terms of public acceptance of the gaming industry, it’s never been higher. You’ve seen it in other jurisdictions—Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia—when the public turns against you, the policymakers are not far behind. Then, two or three of those policymakers that were way ahead of the public are the ones who act, so I care very much about how the public views our industry, and with the commitments we make in the communities where we operate, you know what we mean to all of those communities.

I think that we’re probably standing on firmer ground as an industry than we ever have before. We’re not reliant on one senator or one delegation. We saw that during Covid. We saw that in the Cares Act when we got federal assistance for the first time in the history of the industry. That wasn’t because of one senator or one delegation. It was because we’re in 45 states around the country. And people see what we mean in those communities. So I think that we have a stronger cohort of champions at the federal level among policymakers than we ever have had before.