Online casino platform providers eyeing the soon-to-open Pennsylvania market, gird your loins.
The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) announced on Tuesday that companies looking to provide online 
gaming platforms in the state can start submitting their Interactive Gaming License Applications on June 4. Interested applicants will have to fill out a 59-page form, which they can get on the PGCB website. The state regulator also requires the applicants to be fingerprinted, before commencing a background investigation for individual applicants and entities.
The application for a Pennsylvania iGaming platform provider license isn’t cheap, coming in at $1 million apiece.
Online casino software companies will need to partner with one of the land-based casinos operating in Pennsylvania. The state casino operators, however, have the option to either team up with an iGaming software provider or build their own iGaming platform from the ground up. Casino licensees are expected to partner with an experienced third-party provider, particularly smaller casinos like Valley Forge and Hollywood, which may want to level the playing field against rivals like Parx Casino and Churchill Downs.
The state gambling regulator is currently preparing for the first wave of applications from interactive gaming manufacturers, suppliers and service providers, which are scheduled to start coming in by April 2.
PGCB has allotted a 90-day application period from mid-April through mid-July for the all-in-one license covering online slots, online table games, and online peer-to-peer gaming like poker for a discounted price tag of $10 million. After the 90 days, operators who want only one kind of license can start applying for any of the three licenses, which, by then, will cost $4 million each. Non-Pennsylvanian operators can apply for the individual licenses after 120 days, or sometime around August.
Pennsylvania’s legislation, signed into law in October, allows for 12 licenses for each online category—slots, casino table games and poker—one for each of the state’s land-based casino licensees, although this number has since grown to 13.
The state regulator, however, has yet to clarify how many skins each license can have. Parx and Penn National have been lobbying to keep skins to one per license holder. The PGCB is expected announce its decision on skins when it rolls out more temporary regulations on April 4.
