The same screen where American fans watch the NFL, the NBA, or the latest major esports tournament is now where they check odds, accept a cash out, and review their account balance.
In less than a decade, legal sports betting in the United States has gone from a regulatory niche to one of the engines of the digital entertainment industry, closely aligned with habits that are typical of gamer culture: second screens, real-time data, instant rewards, and a daily routine increasingly mediated by apps.
In 2024, the U.S. sports betting sector posted a record revenue figure of almost $14 billion, according to American Gaming Association data, up from $11 billion in 2023. At the same time, market estimates point to roughly $150 billion in total betting volume (handle) last year.
This has helped cement the country as one of the global growth hubs in this segment. In 2025, the numbers keep climbing, driven by an audience that increasingly behaves like a blend of fan, bettor, and gamer.
A Multi-Billion-Dollar Market In Turbo Mode
The current surge in legal sports betting in the U.S. cannot be understood without looking at the wave of liberalization that began after the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision. Since then, sports betting has become legal in 38 states plus the District of Columbia, with most of those jurisdictions allowing online betting through mobile apps.
That means that for a large share of the adult population, placing a bet on a game has become almost as simple as installing a free-to-play title on a smartphone. The financial results reflect this shift in behavior.
The U.S. sports betting market closed 2024 with around $150 billion in wagers and approximately $13 billion in revenue, generating close to $3 billion in tax revenue for state governments.
In the first five months of 2025, the states that have already reported figures add up to more than $65 billion in bets and nearly $6 billion in revenue, with a hold rate close to 10.1%. In practice, that shows the house is still keeping a large slice of everything that flows through the apps.
This momentum is not only structural; it is also seasonal. Reuters projections suggest that legal betting on the NFL alone should reach around $30 billion for the 2025 season, up 8.5% from the $27.6 billion handled in 2024.
In parallel, the American Gaming Association notes that total commercial gaming revenue (including casinos, iGaming, and sports betting) reached $72 billion in 2024, the fourth consecutive annual record and a snapshot of how risk-based entertainment has become part of the mainstream.
In this highly competitive landscape, bonuses and promotions stopped being minor details and turned into part of the meta-game for bettors. Reviews like Frida M’Nyang’s, which break down each Bovada bonus code and explain step by step how these codes work with dollar or crypto deposits, help users compare rewards, rollover conditions, and user experience before deciding where to bet.
For people who are already used to unlocking seasonal rewards in games or optimizing builds in online RPGs, exploring these promotional offers is just one more layer of strategy in the digital ecosystem.
From Console To Betting App: Who Is Behind The Records
When you look at who is actually generating these record numbers, the overlap with the gaming world becomes clear. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey showed that about 19% of U.S. adults had bet money on sports in the previous year, whether online, at physical venues, or in informal pools. By 2025, that share had risen to 22%.
This group is disproportionately young. Adults aged 18 to 34 account for a significant portion of bettors, the same age bracket that leads consumption of digital games, esports streams, and sports content on platforms like Twitch and YouTube.
Since then, legalization in new states, the expansion of mobile apps, and the normalization of betting lines on sports broadcasts have turned the topic into part of everyday life for people who already live online.
Surveys indicate that roughly 6 in 10 adults in the U.S. believe betting on professional sports should be legal in their state, even though support is much lower when the subject is college sports. For a gamer audience, moving between screens is almost automatic.
The same person who watches a League of Legends match on stream, checks advanced NBA stats in an app, and argues about referee calls on social media now has the option to turn that flow of information into bets with just a few taps. Odds alerts work like dynamic notifications inside a game. The betting account balance is a kind of resource bar that swings with each decision.
Parlays, Fantasy, And Esports: When Betting Speaks The Same Language As Games
The bridge between gamer culture and sports betting becomes even more obvious when you look at the products that have grown the most in recent years. In several states, parlays, those combined bets where the bettor only wins if every leg hits,
have become one of the main revenue drivers for sportsbooks because they offer much higher potential payouts in exchange for a lower probability of success. From an experience design standpoint, that logic is not far from building a risky combo in a MOBA or putting together an aggressive deck in a digital card game.
The bettor assembles a sequence, accepts the risk, and follows each event as if it were a match inside the match. The all-or-nothing feeling in a long parlay is similar to a perfect run in a roguelike. Something similar happens with fantasy sports.
Fantasy platforms have already trained millions of Americans to manage rosters, track injuries, analyze advanced metrics, and make weekly, data-driven decisions. That behavior is baked into gamer culture, which values min-maxing, game theory, and strategy experimentation.
It is no surprise that, alongside fantasy, traditional betting has found room among users who are used to turning numbers into competitive edges. In esports, the convergence is even more direct. Betting on League of Legends, Counter-Strike 2, or Valorant tournaments works as an entry point into other iGaming segments.
That includes online casinos and table games, using the same digital wallet and the same interface. In practice, the player who already understands competitive mechanics in games now finds, in the same account, markets to bet on match results, kills, maps and other indicators that are very familiar to anyone who lives in the competitive gaming universe.
