Germany’s Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder (GGL) has urged lawmakers to give the regulator more scope to adapt to a fast-changing gambling market as the country reviews its 2021 State Treaty on Gambling. The request comes as the GGL marks five years since its creation, with the review carrying implications for licensed operators and market conditions rather than any single enforcement action.
The 2021 treaty consolidated key areas of gambling supervision across Germany’s 16 states into a single authority for the first time. Since then, the GGL says business models, technical structures and forms of illegal gambling have repeatedly changed faster than the state-treaty legal framework can respond, since amending the treaty typically requires a multi-year political and legislative process.
The regulator wants the current evaluation to go beyond assessing existing rules and to address whether the regulatory system itself can be made faster and more adaptable. That argument sits alongside the GGL’s broader push for a tiered framework for online slot stake limits, one example of the kind of technical calibration the authority says demands quicker regulatory response.
Scale of Oversight and Enforcement
The case for greater flexibility rests on the scale of activity the GGL now oversees. The authority employs around 100 staff and lists 129 licensed organisers and intermediaries alongside 229 authorised gambling websites, and it conducted more than 600 supervisory investigations of licensed operators in 2025 covering player protection, advertising and product design. Two licences have been revoked to date, while the LUGAS oversight system recorded 5.3 million registered players by the end of 2025.
Enforcement against unlicensed gambling has intensified sharply. Prohibition proceedings rose from 68 in 2022 to 287 in 2025, and the GGL had examined roughly 6,300 websites for illegal gambling offers or related advertising by year’s end. The authority says 1,843 illegal websites became inaccessible from Germany, 178 were cut off from established payment methods, and 254 unlicensed providers discontinued services for the German market. Since September 2024, only licensed operators have been permitted to advertise via Google Ads in the country.
Institutional Assessment
GGL board member Ronald Benter presented the five-year assessment, framing the authority’s evolution from a newly mandated body into what he described as a fully functional national agency with the legal expertise, data competence and technical understanding needed to supervise a highly digitised, internationally oriented market. Benter argued that centralising supervision across the 16 states has created significant added value, while stressing that a market changing this quickly, both technologically and economically, requires a regulator able to react promptly rather than wait on a slower legislative cycle.
The primary source evidence does not establish whether the treaty evaluation will tighten, liberalise or fundamentally rework Germany’s gambling regime – those remain open questions for lawmakers rather than confirmed outcomes. The GGL’s position echoes a wider pattern seen elsewhere in Europe, where regulators have floated formal proposals for more streamlined rules, and where jurisdictions such as Austria are separately weighing changes to their own licensing structures ahead of 2027.
Source: Focus Gaming News
Petra Vanhoof has spent the better part of a decade following the shifting tides of gambling regulation across Europe and beyond. She came up through the compliance side of the industry before pivoting to writing, which gives her a grounded, no-nonsense perspective on the rules, loopholes, and political maneuvering that shape how operators actually do business. She is particularly drawn to the gap between what regulators say and what the market ends up doing in response.