France has rejected a proposed amendment to their online gaming laws, which would have allowed poker liquidity sharing with other jurisdictions in Europe. The change had been previously suggested before but turned down by the country’s legislators. The online poker market in France has been relatively stagnant in recent years, and this proposal was viewed by many commentators to have been a potential way of positively boosting revenue. It could have allowed licensed poker operators to share liquidity with licensed operators in other European Union countries, to aid their intake of players.
The local gambling operator, ARJEL, urged French politicians to reconsider their decision but to no avail. The suffering online poker market in France will receive no help from outside their jurisdiction. Current French gambling laws (adopted in 2011) dictate that international players are able to play on French poker sites, but players inside France are restricted from playing in any international player pools, a policy of segregation that puts a stranglehold on the online poker market.
So far this is the second time French legislators in the National Assembly have halted attempts to diversify the online poker industry in the country. ARJEL attempted to revive up the regulated online poker market in 2013, however French lawmakers rejected the proposal – they justified their decision by suggesting that the world poker industry was in a general decline, so their was little point trying to shore it up.
French minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry, Emmanuel Macron stated that he was willing to cooperate with ARJEL to come up with a new proposal that legislators would find approve of, but it seems that this is much more complicated than anticipated.
France currently has only ten licensed online poker operators, and only two (Winamax and PokerStars) are considered to be actually making any significant money from their operations in France. ARJEL has pointed out that the challenges facing the online poker industry right now (such as high taxation, limited gambling options and closed off poker rooms) have severely affected the revenue of the remaining French online poker companies, to the extent that half of the original licensees have been persuaded to quit the French market in the last five years, Even high-profile sites such as PKR have decided to leave the French market because their operations there were no longer financially viable.
Overall revenue for the regulated online poker market in France declined by 4% in 2015, which was the third consecutive year of decreasing figures. The rejection of the ARJEL proposal for a second time after a brief debate in the National Assembly has ended conjecture that a European-wide licensed online poker market could be a possibility in the future.