Detroit’s three commercial casinos — MGM Grand Detroit, MotorCity, and Hollywood Casino at Greektown — pulled in $109.72 million combined last month, and buried in that number is a detail I think gets overlooked every time these reports come out: table games and slots alone did $108.86 million of it, up 3% from August last year. Retail sports betting, by comparison, barely moved the needle at $863,913 in adjusted revenue off $7.21 million in handle.
I bring that up because it’s a useful reminder of something the industry doesn’t like to say out loud: for all the noise around mobile sportsbooks and prediction markets over the past few years, land-based casino floors are still doing the heavy lifting in a market like Detroit. Sports betting gets the headlines. Slot machines pay the bills.
Year-to-date through August, Detroit’s table game and slot revenue is up 2% compared to the same stretch in 2025 — not explosive growth, but steady in a market that’s mature enough that steady is actually the story. The city collected $17.1 million in wagering taxes and development payments last month on top of $8.8 million in state gaming taxes, money that goes straight into Detroit’s general fund and school aid programs. That’s the part of these monthly reports I think locals should actually care about more than which casino edged out which for market share.
Compare that to the smaller month-over-month dip — revenue was down 2.5% from July — and you get a pretty normal seasonal pattern. July had a holiday weekend and more tourist traffic; August is back-to-school season, and discretionary spending on a Tuesday-night blackjack table takes a hit when people are buying school supplies instead of chips. Nothing here suggests a slowdown. If anything, an August that’s up year-over-year despite being down sequentially from a stronger July tells you the underlying demand is healthy.
Zoom out to the national numbers and Detroit stops looking like an outlier and starts looking representative: commercial gaming revenue hit a record $78.6 billion across the US in 2025, up 9.1%, with every one of the 38 commercial gaming states except Mississippi posting growth. The land-based casino business isn’t going anywhere, no matter how many prediction market headlines try to convince you the entire industry has moved online.
