The Philippines Outlawed Offshore Gaming. The Studios That Deal Dragon Tiger From Manila Are Not the Ones You Think

Dragon Tiger is an Asian live-studio game before it is anything else, and for two decades the Philippines was where many of those studios lived. The Anti-POGO Act of 2025 did not close them all. It drew a line through the middle of the industry, and the line runs between the tables our readers can reach and the ones they mostly could not.

What the Law Does

The Philippines permanently outlawed offshore gaming with Republic Act No. 12312, the Anti-POGO Act of 2025, signed October 23, 2025. As reported at its signing, the law cancels all existing Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator licences, work permits and visas, and classifies offshore gaming as unlawful under the Anti-Money Laundering Act. It gave statutory force to a shutdown President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had ordered by executive directive in November 2024, effective January 1, 2025, which a government task force spent 2025 enforcing.

The licensed land-based casinos felt the loss of overlapping customers. Okada Manila's gross gaming revenue fell 20.1% to PHP27.8 billion in 2025, with VIP volumes down 48.1%; City of Dreams Manila's fell 15.1% to US$455 million, with VIP down 18.3%, according to the operators' disclosures as relayed by trade press.

Two Kinds of Studio

POGO compounds hosted live-dealer studios that streamed Asian table games, Dragon Tiger prominent among them, to players across the region through sites that held no licence in the player's country. That is the capacity the law removes. It is a different thing from a studio that holds a licence from a recognized regulator and supplies operators who are themselves licensed, even when both are physically in Manila.

Among the studios whose Dragon Tiger we have documented, two publish Philippine studio locations: Vivo Gaming, which names the Philippines and Cambodia and staffs tables with Chinese-, Vietnamese- and Tagalog-speaking dealers, and Asia Gaming, whose live catalog lists Dragon Tiger. Neither publishes rule sheets for the game, and neither publishes which of its studios serves which market, so we cannot say from their own material how the Act reached them. The Philippine regulator, PAGCOR, meanwhile continues to approve electronic games for licensed domestic online play, and its approved lists include a "Dragon & Tiger" electronic table game: the country did not ban the game, it banned a class of operator.

The Tables on Our Page

None of the eight casinos on our comparison page deals Dragon Tiger from a Philippine offshore studio. Evolution streams from Europe and, through Ezugi, from Latin America; Pragmatic Play from its European live studios; On Air Entertainment supplies Jackpot City; Live88, which supplies LiveCasino.io and Play971, moved into an Abu Dhabi studio in 2025 under a UAE licence. The studios that carried Dragon Tiger out of the region's grey market into regulated lobbies were never the studios the Act targets.

What the Act does change is the shape of the game's audience. With the Philippines closed to offshore streaming in 2025 and Cambodia suspending casino-streamed online gambling from October 2026, the region's players are being pushed toward either licensed local products, where they exist, or the international operators that hold licences elsewhere. For a game that grew up in the grey market, that is a material shift in who deals it and under whose rules.