Saying the launch of Digital Instants in North Carolina was a success would be a big understatement.
These online lottery games debuted in November and quickly outpaced expectations.
The North Carolina Lottery became the fastest to generate $1 billion in sales of the online instant product.
Now, early in fiscal year 2025, the games are outperforming lofty goals.
North Carolina unveiled new data during its commission committee meetings on Wednesday.
Digital Instants account for nearly 40% of North Carolina sales
Through two months of fiscal year 2025, the North Carolina Lottery is reporting that Digital Instants have generated $397 million in sales.
That has led to $50.7 million in gross gaming revenue for the state. That represents 81% of the GGR from iLottery in NC.
Coming into the fiscal year, North Carolina set a lofty lottery sales budget due to the early success of Digital Instants.
In FY24, the online option produced $1.13 billion in sales, leading the state to $5.38 billion in total lottery sales, a new record by nearly 24%.
Looking ahead to FY25, the NC Lottery budgeted $6.2 billion in total sales, including $2.2 billion in Digital Instants.
With $397 million through two months, Digital Instants are currently on pace for $2.39 billion in sales for the year.
The game is still carrying North Carolina’s total sales. With draw games currently down 30.7% in purchases over two months, Digital Instants are pushing total instant numbers to an increase of 31.7% ahead of FY24. Altogether, that has North Carolina’s overall sales up 38.4% YoY through two months.
Digital Instants are also growing in their overall percentage of NC Lottery’s business. In FY24, the category accounted for 21.1% of total sales. Thus far in FY25, that is up to 37.9%. Granted, the product was only available for eight months of FY24.
Randy Spielman, Deputy Executive Director of Product Development and Digital Gaming for the North Carolina Education Lottery, detailed the importance of the games to the state’s overall goals. He also noted the strength of the mobile app for playing eInstants:
“It’s driving the majority of our activity in the online play channel. Almost 250,000 players have played Digital Instant games since we launched. Still, the mobile app is the primary channel that they’re engaging with those games. Almost 70% of the activity is coming through the mobile app. That remains a very important channel for us, even for new players. As they’re coming to play Digital Instants for the first time, a lot of them are actually going straight to downloading the mobile app to play through that.”
Multistate progressive jackpots coming to NC iLottery
Knowing it doesn’t want to see sales plateau, the NC Lottery continues to build on its Digital Instants library.
It has begun to add more titles from Instant Win Gaming (IWG), a relatively new partner in North Carolina.
Currently, 28 instant games are active in the state’s online portfolio.
Among the new games it plans to add, multiple progressive jackpots will be included.
One in particular will be the state’s first multistate progressive jackpot. That will be a “MONOPOLY”-branded title from Scientific Games.
The state partnerships were not announced yet, but the digital game will allow for greater jackpots due to it spanning over multiple locations. States like Virginia and Pennsylvania have already worked together to produce online progressive jackpots.
Spielman touched on the importance of adding this option to the Digital Instants portfolio:
“Coming in early calendar year ’25 we’ll be introducing our first multistate progressive game. Same concept with progressive, but it’ll be not only us participating in it, but other jurisdictions are also going to be participating in that. What that allows us to do is generate some progressive jackpots a little bigger than what we can do just by ourselves. So, we’re excited to see that added to the portfolio. Probably a January timeframe is what we’re looking at.”
“MONOPOLY” will be in service for three years, with an additional year option.
North Carolina will also add omnichannel games that will incorporate retail and online options. A series of “Bucks” titles from IWG have been rolling out since August at retail and iLottery platforms.
Photo by Jerome L Lawson via Shutterstock
Graphic from the North Carolina Lottery
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