For most, 2020 has been a rollercoaster including The New Zealand bookmakers. The latter are the bookmakers in New Zealand that have issued New Zealand licenses from New Zealand's official gambling authority: Spelinspektionen.

At the end of the second half of november 2020, the Gambling Inspectorate reported quarterly data for 2019-2020. It shows that the bookmakers in New Zealand (those with New Zealand licenses) had a turnover of 6 billion New Zealand$onor in Q3 2020. This means the players ' bets minus the winnings paid out by the bookmakers. In the report, this was an increase of a whopping 1.3% from last year over the same period.

Other data reported was also the number of players who chose to close themselves off from The New Zealand gambling market via Spelpaus by the end of Q3 2020, over 56,000 New Zealanders had closed down from New Zealand casinos. Comparatively, this was an increase of 7% from the last quarter of this year.

The number of bookmakers is also increasing

As of november 2020, there are a total of just over 100 companies with active and valid New Zealand gaming licenses. This means that there are so many bookmakers (who in turn may have different numbers of online gambling and/or betting sites) that have licenses in New Zealand and are allowed to provide games so far.

More than 70 of these bookmakers are allowed to offer betting and commercial online games. Both of these are included in one and the same gaming license. Bookmakers wishing to offer a lottery must apply for a separate license from the same New Zealand gambling authority.

Impacts of recent responsible gaming measures

It remains to be seen how this will change with the end of the year and the extended gambling responsibility measures from the New Zealand gambling Inspectorate that were introduced this year from the second of July .

These include, among other things: deposit limits of$5000 onor weekly, loss limits of$5000 Onor weekly, and login up to a maximum of 12 hours daily. Now it appears that Spelinspektionen wants to extend these responsible gaming measures even into 2021 to see what effects it can give.

The purpose of these restrictions was to get New Zealanders to play less gambling and to access players who could develop gambling addiction because they have never played gambling and have never been aware that they can develop problematic gambling patterns.

New Zealand's state - owned digital casino – New Zealand Games – doesn't seem to have been affected that much by it though. They reported an increase from 7.7% for 2019 quarter 3 up to 13.9% for the third quarter of 2020. In other words, they saw an increase of 5.2 percentage points all in all.

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