Fanatics has spent years building a name most Canadian sports fans already recognize — team gear, marketplace stuff, a sportsbook operation that’s fighting BetMGM for third place in the U.S. So when the company soft-launched its casino product in Ontario on September 1, quietly enough that most people missed it, becoming the market’s 50th active operator, I wanted to know one specific thing: does a name that size actually show up in the product, or is it just a name that size?
Worth being precise about what actually launched. This is the casino only. No sportsbook yet — that’s slated for 2027, alongside a planned entry into Alberta, according to comments from Fanatics’ President of Gaming, Conor Grant. For a company whose Canadian recognition comes almost entirely from sports, opening with the casino side first is itself a small tell about where the company thinks the easier win is right now: casino games, not sports wagers, account for something like 90% of Ontario’s regulated betting volume.
On the catalogue itself, Fanatics has been fairly upfront that it’s not arriving complete. The company describes its Ontario offering as “hundreds of games across live dealer, slots and table games,” sourced at launch from IGT PlayDigital, Evolution, and Playtech — with more suppliers said to be coming. Grant’s own framing to Canadian Gaming Business was that the company wants to get the product “into tip-top shape,” which is a fair way of admitting this is a starting point, not a finished shelf.
That’s a reasonable way to launch. It’s also a noticeably thinner opening than what showed up in Ontario three weeks earlier, from a company most Ontario players have never heard of.
Betinia — part of Canadix Limited, the same operator behind ToonieBet and Swiper — went live here in August. Depending on which review outlet’s count you trust, its library at launch ran somewhere in the range of 5,500-plus games pulled from the mid-to-high eighties in provider count. Those figures come from third-party casino-review sites rather than an AGCO filing or a Betinia press release, so I’d treat the exact numbers as directional rather than official. But even generously discounted, “thousands of games from dozens of studios” and “hundreds of games from three named suppliers” aren’t close enough to call a rounding error.
None of this means Fanatics is behind, exactly, or that Betinia is somehow the more serious operator. A three-week head start isn’t nothing, and a company that says explicitly it’s still adding providers is describing a rollout, not a final state — the gap could look very different by the time either of these gets its first real anniversary. It’s also just two operators. I’m not using this to make a claim about how Ontario’s market works in general, and this isn’t a case for concluding that recognizable brands as a rule launch thinner than the operators nobody’s heard of yet.
What it does say something about, at least in this one instance, is the assumption that a household name walks in the door with an equally substantial product behind it. It doesn’t have to. The AGCO license, the iGO operating agreement, and the marketing budget are one set of hurdles. Building out a slots and live-dealer catalogue that can compete with an operator most players have never heard of is a separate project, on its own separate timeline — and the size of the logo out front doesn’t appear to have sped that part up.
I’ll be curious to check back on this once Fanatics has had a few months to round out its supplier list. For now, if you’re picking a casino based on catalogue depth rather than brand familiarity, it’s worth actually looking at what’s on the shelf before assuming the name on the door tells you.
Slots are entertainment, not income, and no amount of research or experience changes the math underneath the game. The Responsible Gambling page has more on that, along with support options in Ontario if you ever want them.