Asia’s two biggest gambling policy experiments in 2025-26 produced opposite outcomes. The Philippines banned offshore gaming operators (POGOs) yet still grew its total gross gaming revenue to ₱396.14 billion, driven by a domestic online pivot, while India’s blanket ban on real-money games erased an estimated $3.5 billion sector, cost thousands of jobs, and was then compounded by a Supreme Court ruling upholding retrospective 28% GST on the full value of historic bets. One country regulated its way to higher tax capture; the other prohibited its way into a legal and fiscal mess that is still unresolved.
Key takeaways
- PAGCOR’s total 2025 revenue fell 5.09% to ₱106.03 billion after the POGO ban, but industry-wide gross gaming revenue still rose 6.39% to ₱396.14 billion as domestic e-gaming overtook casinos as the top contributor.
- India’s Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 banned all online real-money games nationwide regardless of skill or chance, effective 1 May 2026.
- More than 7,000 jobs and over $840 million in asset write-downs hit India’s gaming sector within 90 days of the ban being passed, even before enforcement rules were notified.
- A May 2026 Supreme Court ruling added a retrospective 28% GST demand exceeding ₹1 lakh crore on historic bet values, independent of the operating ban.
- The Philippines consolidated from over 300 offshore-facing licenses at the 2019 POGO peak to roughly 45 domestic electronic gaming licenses by May 2026, trading volume for tax capture and oversight.
Table of contents
The Philippines: banning offshore, doubling down on domestic
In October 2025, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed into law a permanent ban on all Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators.
The very lucrative segment slid after President Marcos signed into law a permanent ban on all Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators in October 2025, with the President citing social costs and threats to national security as reasons for the prohibition.
The move followed years of controversy over POGOs’ links to criminal networks, human trafficking and reputational damage, issues the government had already flagged when the ban was first announced in 2024.
Rather than retreat from gambling as a revenue source, the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) pivoted the entire regulatory architecture toward domestic, tightly monitored online operators.
PAGCOR has issued approximately 45 Domestic Electronic Gaming Licenses as of May 2026, down dramatically from the more than 300 offshore-facing licenses that existed at the POGO system’s peak in 2019, with the consolidation intentional: fewer, better-capitalized operators serving the domestic market are expected to produce more tax revenue and stronger player protections than the fragmented offshore model.
Each licensee now faces real capital and compliance thresholds.
Each licensed operator must maintain a minimum capitalization of 200 million Philippine pesos, post a performance bond, and integrate with PAGCOR’s centralized monitoring system, with mandatory deposit limits, self-exclusion tools and age verification systems required to meet international responsible gambling standards.
PAGCOR’s own leadership has been explicit that prohibition is not the preferred policy tool, even for online products that draw scrutiny.
PAGCOR Chairman and CEO Alejandro H. Tengco pushed for stricter regulations for online gaming instead of an outright ban, saying that prohibition would only encourage illegal operations and deprive the government of needed revenues.
That philosophy — regulate the channel rather than eliminate it — is the central contrast with India’s approach, covered below.
What PAGCOR’s 2025 numbers actually show
The headline figures look contradictory at first glance, and it’s worth separating PAGCOR’s own revenue (its cut as both regulator and operator) from industry-wide gross gaming revenue (GGR), which covers all licensed casinos and gaming operators in the country.
On the regulator side,
PAGCOR’s total revenues declined by 5.1% to Php106.0 billion (US$1.80 billion) in 2025, impacted by a softening of the land-based casino sector and the ban on POGOs, though this was somewhat offset by a surge in domestic online or eGames revenues, particularly in the first half of the year.
Breaking that down further,
revenues from gaming operations were slightly lower year-on-year at Php95.2 billion (US$1.62 billion), while other revenue streams including interest earnings, income and service fees contributed an additional Php10.9 billion (US$185 million).
The electronic and online segment is where the real story sits.
More than half of PAGCOR’s gaming revenues, totalling Php53.3 billion (US$904 million), came from electronic and online gaming activities, including eGames, eBingo, and bingo grantees.
Land-based casinos, by contrast, struggled:
revenues from licensed casinos fell by 4.93% to Php31.4 billion (US$533 million) and from PAGCOR-operated casinos by 18.12% to Php10.4 billion (US$176 million).
Zooming out to the full industry level, the picture is unambiguously one of growth, not contraction.
The Philippine gaming industry generated Php396.14 billion in gross gaming revenues in 2025, up 6.39% from the Php372.33 billion in the previous year, with revenues from the online and electronic gaming sector offsetting the decline in earnings from brick-and-mortar casinos.
The electronic segment’s scale increase was dramatic:
the electronic and online gaming segment brought in Php201.12 billion in revenues, a 30.04% increase from Php154.66 billion in 2024.
For the first time, digital gaming overtook brick-and-mortar casinos as the industry’s largest contributor.
PAGCOR’s chairman noted the E-Games and online gaming segment accounted for 50.77% of total industry GGR, and “it has overtaken licensed casinos as the largest GGR contributor.”
| Metric | 2024 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total industry GGR | Php372.33 billion | Php396.14 billion | +6.39% |
| Electronic/online gaming segment GGR | Php154.66 billion | Php201.12 billion | +30.04% |
| Licensed casino GGR | Php201.84 billion | Php182.50 billion | -9.58% |
| PAGCOR total revenue | Php111.72 billion | Php106.03 billion | -5.09% |
| Domestic electronic gaming licenses | — | ~45 (May 2026) | down from 300+ offshore licenses at 2019 peak |
Even the transition had bumps:
electronic gaming revenue growth came despite a temporary slump in the third quarter of 2025 following the de-linking of e-wallets, which disrupted player access and payment channels.
That detail matters for anyone tracking payments infrastructure in the region — see our coverage of technology, payments and crypto gambling for how channel disruptions ripple through operator revenue.
India: from legal grey area to outright prohibition
India took the opposite route. For years, real-money gaming operated in a patchwork of state laws and court rulings that distinguished “games of skill” (generally permitted) from “games of chance” (generally prohibited). That ambiguity ended abruptly in August 2025.
On August 22, 2025, the Government of India passed The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, under which offering online “real money games” involving stakes and monetary returns are completely banned.
The legislative speed was notable even by the standards of sector-defining bills.
Parliament passed the act within three days: introduced on 20 August, passed by the Rajya Sabha on 21 August and signed by the president on 22 August — the fastest passage of a sector-defining bill into law.
Crucially, the law does not carve out an exception for skill-based games, closing the loophole operators had relied on for a decade.
Section 5 bans offering an “online money game,” and the definition catches a game whether it is skill or chance.
The act bans all “online real-money games,” covering games of chance like slots, Teen Patti, Andar Bahar, and roulette, as well as games of skill such as poker and paid fantasy sports contests.
Free-to-play formats survive:
free-to-play fantasy sports contests are still legal, provided they don’t offer cash prizes and comply with the act.
Enforcement targets the supply side, not players.
The law demands immediate shut down of services offering online money games such as rummy, poker and fantasy sports irrespective of whether the game is based on skill or chance, with primary offences punishable by imprisonment up to three years and fines up to ₹1 crore — interestingly, the law places no penalty on users.
Banks were pulled into the enforcement net too:
all banks and financial institutions facilitating financial transactions related to online money gaming services are prohibited from engaging in or facilitating such activities
, and
the bill also bars payment service providers and financial intermediaries from facilitating transactions related to such games.
The rules implementing the act did not arrive immediately:
the act and the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Rules, 2026 came into force on 1 May 2026
, months after royal assent.
The fiscal fallout: jobs, write-downs and a retroactive tax bomb
The economic disruption was immediate and large. Before the ban, the sector was a genuine growth story.
An industry once touted to be worth about USD2.5 billion a year, employing millions and drawing an estimated USD3 billion in foreign investment, now faces an existential crisis.
Separately, reporting put the real-money gaming vertical’s scale even higher:
the legislative overhaul effectively dismantled India’s $3.5 billion RMG sector by outlawing paid contests.
Job losses mounted fast and kept mounting. In the first month,
player deposits worth over ₹3,720 crore had evaporated and tax revenue losses tallied up to over ₹1,041 crore, with more than 6,500 jobs vanishing in 26 days
. By the three-month mark, the toll had grown substantially:
more than Rs70 billion ($840 million) was written off and over 7,000 jobs eliminated as the act remained unnotified nearly 90 days after passage
, with
total revenue losses exceeding Rs100 billion ($1.2 billion) and an estimated GST shortfall for the government.
A year-end tally put the aggregate employment impact considerably higher across the wider ecosystem:
the sector had attracted ₹25,896 crore ($3 billion) in foreign direct investment, and more than two lakh direct and indirect jobs linked to the real-money gaming ecosystem were reportedly affected by the decision.
Listed and multinational operators took the heaviest balance-sheet hits.
Flutter Entertainment posted a $556 million impairment following the shutdown of India subsidiary Junglee Games, Canadian private equity firm Clairvest Group wrote off its investment in Head Digital Works, and India’s Nazara Technologies recorded an impairment of $103.2 million on its investment in Moonshine Technologies, parent of PokerBaazi.
The Flutter write-down alone reshaped its quarterly results:
Flutter Entertainment recorded a $556 million impairment after cash-based rummy operations at its India unit, Junglee Games, came to a standstill, contributing to a $789 million quarterly net loss, with CEO Peter Jackson describing the regulatory shock as “sudden and unexpected.”
Then, in May 2026, a separate legal track compounded the damage. India’s GST authorities had long argued that online gaming platforms owed 28% tax on the full value of bets, not merely on platform commissions — a dispute predating the outright ban.
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of 28% GST on online gaming on May 27, ruling that gaming platforms are suppliers of actionable claims, and it constitutes taxable consideration.
The court explicitly rejected the skill-versus-chance distinction that operators had used to limit their exposure:
the justices ruled that organized online gaming activities involving money staked on uncertain outcomes, including fantasy sports, constitute betting and gambling under the GST framework, and are therefore subject to a 28% levy on the full face value of player deposits.
Because the ruling applies retroactively, it revives tax bills for years of activity that predate the 2025 ban.
The decision carries retrospective effect and exposes the industry to combined tax demands exceeding Rs 1 lakh crore, covering the period before October 1, 2023, when the GST Council formally amended the law to impose 28% GST on full bet value for online gaming, casinos, and horse racing.
Some estimates of the total exposure run even higher once historical demands across all operators are aggregated, with figures cited as high as roughly ₹2.5 lakh crore. The court also closed off a separate avenue operators had used to challenge state-level restrictions:
the Supreme Court reversed High Court decisions, drawing a distinction between “betting” and “gambling” and holding that state legislatures have the competence to regulate these activities under their legislative powers
, meaning even previously permitted skill-based money games can be banned by individual states independent of the national act.
Why the two paths diverged
The Philippines and India both cite the same underlying concerns — addiction, financial harm, money laundering, and in the Philippines’ case, transnational organized crime tied to POGO compounds. But the policy instruments differ sharply.
Manila banned a narrow, offshore-facing segment (POGOs) explicitly linked to criminal exploitation and foreign-worker trafficking, while simultaneously building out a licensed, capitalized domestic online framework with centralized monitoring, deposit limits and self-exclusion tools. The goal was channeling activity into a smaller, better-supervised, more taxable market rather than eliminating online betting as a category.
The fiscal logic is straightforward: the POGO system generated significant gross revenue but captured only a fraction of it in Philippine tax receipts because offshore operators structured their businesses to minimize domestic tax exposure.
New Delhi, by contrast, banned the entire real-money category nationwide — skill and chance alike — citing
concerns over addiction, financial distress, money laundering, and unlawful data transfers facilitated through online gaming platforms.
The fiscal cost to the state itself is significant and arguably self-inflicted:
the industry contributed over ₹20,000 crore annually in direct and indirect taxes, with the real money gaming segment accounting for nearly 86% of the sector’s revenue, and a potential annual GST revenue loss of ₹15,000 crore to ₹20,000 crore is estimated following the ban.
One industry executive framed the practical consequence bluntly: banning the legal industry risks
“pushes fan engagement away from regulated Indian platforms into unregulated offshore spaces, which defeats the very intent of consumer protection.”
For readers comparing regulatory philosophies across regions, this split echoes patterns we’ve tracked elsewhere — contrast it with the UK’s stagnation-through-regulation approach or Brazil’s newly regulated market surge, both of which chose licensing and taxation over prohibition.
Where this leaves Asia-Pacific’s gambling market
India and the Philippines sit inside a region that research firms still expect to grow briskly overall, even with India’s largest segment removed from the legal column.
The Asia Pacific online gambling market size increased from USD 26.11 billion in 2025 to USD 29.70 billion in 2026 and is expected to reach USD 59.75 billion by 2034, a CAGR of 9.15% during 2026-2034.
One market snapshot still listed India as a high-growth driver going into this disruption:
India’s share of regional growth was estimated at 14.8% in 2025, with sports betting the leading game type at 46.3% share.
Whether that trajectory holds now that the country’s largest real-money verticals are illegal is an open question the next few reporting cycles will answer.
Separate estimates of the broader online gambling market put Asia-Pacific as the fastest-growing region globally even after accounting for prohibition risk:
Asia-Pacific represented 21.7% of the Online Gambling Market in 2025, with a market value of USD 18.51 billion, and the region is expected to register the fastest CAGR of 14.25% during 2026–2034.
That forecast implicitly assumes growth concentrates in markets choosing regulation over prohibition — Japan, Australia, parts of Southeast Asia, and now a narrower, more tightly licensed Philippine market — while India’s contribution to legal online betting revenue effectively resets to near zero pending any future legislative reversal. For broader regional revenue comparisons, see our analysis of why the EU accounted for 42% of global gambling revenue in 2025 and our tracking of North America’s projected 11.5% CAGR, both useful benchmarks for judging whether Asia’s regulated segments can close the gap.
The structural lesson for operators and regulators elsewhere is less about morality and more about tax architecture. PAGCOR’s licensing overhaul demonstrates that a capitalization floor, centralized monitoring, and consolidated licensee count can grow both revenue and theoretically improve player protection simultaneously. India’s experience shows that an abrupt, undifferentiated ban — stacked with a retroactive tax ruling — can destroy legal-market value, jobs and investor confidence without necessarily reducing consumer demand, which the JCDC Sports executive quote above suggests may simply migrate to unregulated offshore operators outside any consumer protection framework. Readers interested in how licensing regimes are built and compared across jurisdictions can explore our licensing and jurisdictions hub.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly was banned in the Philippines?
The ban targeted Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) — operators licensed in the Philippines but serving customers outside the country, largely in China.
President Marcos signed into law a permanent ban on all POGOs in October 2025, citing social costs and threats to national security.
Domestic online gaming (eGames, eBingo, onshore poker) remains legal and licensed.
Does India’s ban cover skill-based games like poker and rummy?
Yes.
The act’s definition of a banned “online money game” catches a game whether it is skill or chance
, closing the legal distinction courts had previously used to permit rummy and poker for stakes.
Why does the Indian GST ruling matter if real-money gaming is already banned?
The ban stops future operations, but the Supreme Court’s GST ruling addresses tax owed on past activity.
The decision carries retrospective effect, exposing the industry to combined tax demands exceeding Rs 1 lakh crore for the period before the GST Council’s October 2023 amendment.
That means operators face liabilities for years of legal operation even though the law has since changed.
What happens to players in banned or restricted markets?
Indian law does not penalize individual players, only operators, payment facilitators and marketers.
The criminal penalties are pointed at operators, advertisers and payment facilitators; the act prescribes no penalty for a person who simply plays.
In practice this pushes demand toward unlicensed offshore sites with no local consumer protections, a dynamic flagged by industry voices during the transition.
Is the Philippines’ or India’s gambling market bigger?
By total industry GGR, the Philippines is currently far larger in reported legal gambling revenue.
The Philippine gaming industry generated Php396.14 billion in gross gaming revenues in 2025
(roughly $6.7 billion), while India’s legal real-money gaming revenue has been reduced to effectively zero following the 2025-26 ban and GST rulings, with its prior ~$3-3.5 billion sector now dismantled.
Methodology note
GamblScout.com’s algorithm tracks regulatory filings, government gazettes, listed-company financial disclosures and court rulings as primary signals when assessing jurisdiction risk. For this comparison we weighted PAGCOR’s official revenue disclosures, Philippine government statements, Indian parliamentary and Supreme Court records, and listed-operator impairment filings (Flutter Entertainment, Nazara Technologies) over secondary commentary. Our broader scoring approach, including how jurisdiction stability factors into operator scores, is detailed on our scoring system and algorithmic weights page and our regional deep dives hub.
Gambling involves risk. Only play with money you can afford to lose and use the deposit limits and self-exclusion tools available in your jurisdiction.
