Gross gaming revenue (GGR) is, in its usual definition, the amount players staked minus the prizes paid back to them. Net gaming revenue (NGR) starts from that figure and subtracts further deductions, and which deductions it subtracts depends on the company reporting it. That one sentence explains most of the confusion readers run into when two operators publish “revenue” figures that look like they measure the same thing but do not.
The core arithmetic, with a hypothetical example
Imagine a small online casino that, over one month, takes in 1,000 units of player stakes and pays out 950 units in prizes. Its GGR is 1,000 minus 950, which is 50. Nothing about this number tells you whether the business made money. It is a measure of what the games retained, before a single salary, licence fee or marketing invoice has been paid.
The figure of 50 also looks small against the 1,000 staked, and that is normal. In this example the retained share is 5 percent of stakes, which is the reciprocal of a 95 percent payout rate. The gap between money wagered and money kept is the reason “turnover” and “revenue” should never be used interchangeably. A company could report enormous turnover and modest GGR, and both statements would be accurate descriptions of the same activity.
Why stakes are not simply “deposits”
A common reader mistake is to treat stakes as the money players put into the account. They are not. A player who deposits 100 units and plays slot spins of 1 unit each can generate several hundred units of stakes from that single deposit, because winnings are recycled into further bets. GGR counts the net loss across all that recycling, not the cash that crossed the cashier. This is why a company’s GGR can sit far below its total deposits, and why neither number should be read as a proxy for the other.
Where GGR ends and NGR begins
NGR is the figure left after deductions are taken from GGR. The word “usually” matters here, because there is no single universal list of what those deductions are. Different companies, regulators and tax regimes draw the line in different places. Common candidates include:
- bonus costs, meaning the value of promotional credit given to players and later wagered or withdrawn;
- gaming duties or levies charged on the operator’s activity;
- fees paid to game suppliers or platform providers, often a percentage of the revenue a title generates;
- payment processing charges and, in some definitions, chargebacks or fraud losses.
Not every company deducts all of these, and some deduct items in a different order. A figure labelled NGR at one operator may therefore be closer to what another would call “revenue after duties”, while a third might use the same label for a number that still includes supplier fees. The label tells you far less than the footnote defining it.
A worked illustration of the same GGR producing different NGRs
Return to the hypothetical GGR of 50. Suppose the operator gave out 8 units of bonus credit that players converted into real play, owed a gaming duty of 6 units, and paid 4 units to game providers. One company might define NGR as GGR minus bonuses, giving 42. A second might subtract bonuses and duty, giving 36. A third might subtract all three, landing at 32. All three began with an identical GGR of 50, and all three could truthfully say they reported “net gaming revenue”. The spread between 32 and 42 is not an error. It is a definitional choice, and it is exactly the sort of detail that decides whether two companies can be fairly compared.
Net profit is a different thing entirely
It is worth drawing a hard line between gross return, in the sense used here, and net profit. GGR and NGR are both measures of revenue: what the gaming activity retained, with progressively more deducted. Net profit is what remains after every cost of running the business has been subtracted, including staff, technology, marketing, licensing, premises, interest and corporate tax. A casino company can post healthy NGR and still report a loss, because its operating costs exceed the revenue. Equally, a company with modest NGR but a lean cost base can be solidly profitable.
This distinction is not pedantry. Headlines that celebrate “record revenue” say nothing about profitability, and a reader who sees a rising NGR line should ask what happened to costs over the same period. Revenue growth bought through heavy bonus spending or expensive customer acquisition can depress profit even as the top line climbs. That is also why NGR, where bonuses are deducted, is often a more honest indicator of underlying health than GGR, where they are not.
Why promotions and fees complicate the comparison
Promotions are the single largest source of disagreement between definitions. A free-spin offer has a real cost to the operator, but how that cost is recorded varies. Some companies treat the bonus as a deduction from revenue at the moment it is wagered, others when it is credited, and others record the cost only if it is converted into withdrawable winnings. The same marketing campaign can therefore shift reported NGR in different directions depending on the accounting policy, and different timing can move revenue between reporting periods without any change in underlying performance.
Fees add a second layer. Where a studio takes a share of the revenue its games generate, that share can be treated as a cost of sales below the revenue line or as a deduction within NGR. The choice changes the headline number without changing the economics. For readers, the practical lesson is that the question to ask of any revenue figure is not “how big is it” but “what has already been taken out of it”.
How the numbers connect to what players experience
For a player-facing audience, GGR has a useful link to the games themselves. The retained share of stakes over a large volume of play is what a game’s design is built to produce, and it is determined by the payout structure rather than by anything an individual session reveals. A short run of play can land far above or below the long-run average, which is why one person’s result says little about the product. Aggregate GGR across millions of spins smooths those swings, which is exactly what makes it a stable measure for a company and a poor guide for any single sitting.
It also explains why changes to game mix show up in reported revenue. If an operator shifts its catalogue toward titles with a lower retained share, GGR as a fraction of stakes can fall even while play volume rises. Conversely, a growing share of stakes flowing through higher-margin products can lift GGR without any increase in player numbers. Reading revenue alongside stakes, rather than alone, shows which of these is happening.
A sensible way to read the filings
When you meet a revenue figure in a company report or press release, work through three questions in order. First, is it GGR, NGR or something the company has named itself, and where is that term defined? Second, what sits between GGR and the reported number, and are those deductions applied consistently from one period to the next? Third, how does revenue relate to costs and to stakes, so that growth in one is not mistaken for health in the other?
If a company changes how it defines a measure between years, the comparison across those years is weakened until the figures are restated on a common basis, and a careful report will say so. Where the definition is missing or vague, treat the number as incomplete rather than authoritative. Everything here is general explanation of how these terms tend to work, not financial advice, and it is not a substitute for the definitions in the company’s own documents, which are the only reliable source for what a particular figure includes.