PAGCOR freezes e-gaming licenses; consolidation accelerates

PAGCOR has confirmed it is maintaining a freeze on new e-gaming license applications. This is not a temporary pause pending a policy review. It is a deliberate posture consistent with the regulator's actions across 2026: raising the minimum fee floor, allowing non-compliant operators to exit, and accepting that the licensed population will shrink significantly.

The numbers frame the scale. More than 60% of online operators have already been culled, primarily by the minimum fee requirement. PAGCOR's own net income has fallen 91%, a figure that reflects both the loss of license fee revenue from departed operators and the broader contraction of the regulated market it oversees.

The freeze removes the release valve that a growing market normally provides. In an expanding market, new entrants absorb consumer demand that incumbents cannot or will not serve. With the freeze in place, demand that falls outside the surviving licensed operators has nowhere regulated to go. That creates conditions for unlicensed activity to fill the gap, which is the opposite of what consolidation policy is meant to achieve.