Supply is the lever the Philippine regulator is pulling. PAGCOR will not issue new online gaming licences for now, chairman and chief executive Alejandro Tengco said in remarks reported by The Philippine Star on 27 August. The count stands at 48, down from 74, and the moratorium that has kept new names off the register — a board resolution dated March 2024, per the same report — stays where it is. The fall itself is exits; the freeze is what stops the gap being refilled.
Tengco’s stated reason is consolidation. He wants the industry to settle before the door reopens, and said the question of further licences would be revisited afterwards. The report attaches no date to that review.
The arithmetic under the cap
The rates are fixed: 30 percent for e-game operators and 25 percent for integrated resorts, effective 1 January, per the same report. What is not fixed is the industry they are drawn from. Gross gaming revenue — total bets minus payouts — is estimated at around PHP370 billion this year, against the PHP396.14 billion recorded in 2025, on the same figures. That is a decline, on the numbers the regulator itself is working from.
That is the shape of the policy. A fixed rate, a fixed number of payers, and a revenue pool the regulator’s own estimate has shrinking. Consolidation is the mechanism by which 48 licence holders are meant to become a smaller group of more solvent ones rather than a larger group of thinner ones. Whether it works is a question about balance sheets, not about licensing.
The demand side, tightened in parallel
The cap is the visible half of a wider squeeze. Depositing now requires a valid government ID and a real-time selfie, prime-time advertising between 5.30pm and 8.30pm is off limits, and Tengco has said publicly he would prefer a complete advertising ban if one can be enforced, as reported by iGaming Business in February. Enforcement runs alongside: the Star’s report has Tengco disclosing a PHP1 million fine against the operator behind an influencer-promoted giveaway of 100 handsets, which PAGCOR also ordered stopped.
What to watch
Three markers. Whether consolidation arrives as surrendered licences or as transfers between existing holders — the second keeps the register at 48 while changing who owns it. Whether the PHP370 billion figure is revised once half-year numbers firm up. And whether the moratorium outlives PAGCOR’s own restructuring, which we assess separately; an agency that no longer runs casinos has a different set of incentives about how many operators it wants on the register.
We track licence supply because it prices entry to a market, and that cost sits on our readers’ own books. Which is the whole of our interest here: this desk covers the business of gaming for an adult trade readership, and has nothing to sell to anyone who plays.