On the face of it, the new laws for the Austrian street market looked promising. Instead of four of nine jurisdictions permitting AWP-style machines in arcades and pubs, now all nine will allow them. Stakes are to go up from 50 eurocents to a maximum €10 and prizes will rise from €20 to a top award of €20,000.
The downside, however, is that there will only be 1,800 machines in Vienna, and about 5,500 spread all over the rest of the country. This will replace a current total of about 10,000 legal machines and perhaps double that number of ‘grey area’ or illegal machines.
Only three licences will be issued per jurisdiction and this will mean that many legal and many more illegal operators will be thrown out of business.
The casino industry will see three more licences issued, but there is every prospect of the Casinos Austria monopoly being broken. The new regulations have been drawn up by the Ministry of Finance and will be made law in a matter of weeks.
More details will be published in the next issue of InterGame.
