PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that the online gaming industry was strengthened before the financial crisis kicked in by the previous shockwaves in the industry, such as the smoking ban and the recent Gaming Act in the UK. The company also found that there was a fall in spending on games of chance of eight percent during the last turndown, which was twice as much as the gross domestic product fell, which suggests that the market is less vulnerable now. PriveWaterhouseCoopers also found that there is a relationship between the national gross domestic product, the consumer spending, the rate of unemployment and the spending on different kinds of games. The bingo games are the least cyclical form of gaming while the casinos were the highest when it comes to spending. The Head Of Gaming for PriceWaterhouseCoopers UK practice, David Trunkfield said: More habitual, lower ticket forms of neighbourhood gaming will perform better than impulsive purchases such as scratch cards or high stakes betting. Small stakes gaming such as bingo, lotteries and AWPs may well outperform the downturn. It appears likely that betting and casinos will be impacted more by the recession than bingo, which may benefit from the resilience of its target demographic. PriceWaterhouseCoopers could confirm that the land-based bingo industry had been hit hard by the smoking ban and the changes to machine games had cut sales with more than 20 percent from their peak. Any further impacts from the crisis were likely to be muted by the former events and the forecast is that the land-based bingo industry will see a zero to a three percent fall in revenues in 2009 while the numbers for the online bingo industry is much better with a forecast of growth in 2009. In addition, the key target demographic may be insulated from the downturn by pension income and their disposable income should benefit from anticipated falls in the inflation rate for food and utility bills, said Trunkfield.
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