In Australia, pokies are the most popular form of gambling by far. However, the country falls behind other nations in terms of the number of gaming machines hosted in local clubs, pubs and casinos. According to a study, Japan is in the lead while Australia falls into the Top 10. The Gaming Technologies Association recently published a study about the countries which host the most gaming machines.

The World Count of Gaming Machines 2013 found that Japan had the highest number of legal pokies, with venues across the country hosting 4.5 million games. In Japan, gambling is illegal so traditional pokies are not available. Instead, the gaming machine market consists of Pachinko games, which pay out balls and tokens to be exchanged for prizes.

The country with the next highest number was the United States, but its pokie count did not even come close to Japan. In the USA, there are just over 800 000 gaming machine. Italy took the third spot on the list with 412 000 legal gaming machines in the country. The rest of the Top 5 consisted of Germany (265 000) and Spain (249 000). Australia has the sixth highest number of gaming machines with 198 000 pokies.

Japan and the United States have maintained their rankings as the top gaming machine countries since 2002. Australia has fluctuated between the fifth and eighth spot for the past decade. The study broke the findings down further into jurisdictions. What is interesting to note about these statistics is that most of the jurisdictions on the list are countries.

The only jurisdictions that are states are: Nevada, Oklahoma and New South Wales. Nevada was fourth on the list behind Spain, hosting 181 000 games. New South Wales was seventh on the list behind the United Kingdom, with 95 000. The study is very interesting, and it can be viewed at the GTA’s website: www.gamingta.com/pdf/World_Count_2014.pdf.

About the Author

George Anderson
Author George, has over 25+ years’ experience in the Pokies and Casinos industry throughout Australia and New Zealand. Loves to research new Pokies games on the block and follows announcements from top industry providers about their upcoming releases. As soon as a new interesting pokie game appears on his radar, George is there to check it out and give you the scoop before anyone else and tell you about all casino sites where can play the latest game. Before this gig, George worked as Pokie game tester, making him an ideal candidate for this genre of work. He is also an animal lover and a proud owner of three dogs.