Belgium: revenue up 5.4%, first-time players down 43%

The Belgian Gaming Commission’s 2025 annual report shows online gross gaming revenue at €965m, up 5.4% — and first-time online registrations at 110,032, down 43.1% from 193,342 a year earlier. Both numbers are true at once, and the gap between them is the story.

A market that is growing and shrinking at the same time

Revenue up, daily actives up, new sign-ups almost halved. That combination has one arithmetic explanation: the existing player base is spending more, and it is not being replaced at the rate it used to be. A market can run that way for a while. It cannot run that way indefinitely, because every cohort eventually churns.

The regulator attributes part of the decline to Belgium raising its minimum gambling age from 18 to 21, effective 1 September 2024. That alone removes three birth years from the top of the funnel — and 2025 is the first full year in which the change applied.

Where the missing players went is the open question

The Belgian Association of Gaming Operators has pointed at a survey finding that 28% of respondents aged 18 to 30 say they have already played on an illegal gambling site, arguing that restrictions have made licensed operators invisible while unlicensed ones stay visible.

That is an industry body making an industry body’s argument, and it should be read that way. But it sits alongside research published in early September estimating Europe’s illegal online market at €12bn, roughly a quarter of all online play. Two different sources, pointing the same direction, in the same month.

What nobody can show is the counterfactual: how many of the 83,000 missing first-time registrations are 18- to 20-year-olds who are now simply not eligible, and how many are people who registered somewhere else.

What this looks like from an operator’s side

A Belgian licence in 2026 buys access to a base that monetises well and is hard to grow. That changes the shape of a business case in three ways.

Acquisition cost goes up before it goes down. With advertising tightly restricted and a smaller eligible population, the cheap channels are gone. Operators who planned on a paid-media curve will find the numbers do not work and the payback period is longer than modelled.

Retention economics carry the model. If you cannot grow the top of the funnel, value has to come from the players already there — which means the bonus engine, the lobby and the cashier are not features but the whole commercial argument. Operators running a platform where a campaign needs a developer are structurally disadvantaged in a market like this.

Cross-sell stops being optional. A player who already exists is the cheapest player you will ever get. Running sport and casino on one wallet, so the same account moves between them without a transfer, is the difference between one revenue line and two from the same acquisition cost.

The wider pattern

Belgium is an early, sharp version of something visible across regulated Europe: mature markets where the licensed sector is profitable, tightly bounded and no longer growing by acquisition. The Netherlands, the UK and the Nordics are each some distance along the same curve.

For suppliers the implication is unglamorous. The features that sell in a growth market — scale, speed to launch, catalogue size — matter less than the ones that sell in a mature one: retention tooling an operations team can actually use, reporting that reconciles, and payments that convert on the first attempt.

Based on the Belgian Gaming Commission (Kansspelcommissie) 2025 annual report, reported 17–18 September 2026, and on Euromat-commissioned research into Europe’s unlicensed online market published 7 September 2026. Survey figures cited by BAGO are self-reported and not independently verified here.