Rockstar switches off GTA Online's casino gambling in Australia

On July 28 Australian players opened the Diamond Casino & Resort in GTA Online and found the betting gone. Slots, blackjack, roulette, three card poker, Inside Track and the private penthouse table no longer work, and neither does the free daily Lucky Wheel spin. Kotaku, GameSpot, PC Gamer, Insider Gaming and Dexerto all reported it the same day. What survives is everything that is not a wager: the 1,000 free chips still arrive daily, chips can be bought and sold, and the casino store keeps selling its clothes. Australian players say Red Dead Online's card games went dark at the same time. The casino had been open to them since 2019, so seven years of gambling was switched off in an afternoon.

Rockstar has said nothing. No announcement, no reason, no word on whether the block is permanent. The regime it lands in is well documented, though. Australia's Age-Restricted Material Codes took effect on 9 March 2026 under the Online Safety Act, and the eSafety Commissioner lists simulated gambling as age-restricted material alongside pornography and high-impact violence. Australia already hands an R 18+ rating to any game with simulated gambling, and the codes demand working age assurance rather than a ticked box, with penalties reaching AU$49.5 million. Australian streamer DarkViperAU, who flagged the shutdown, reads it as caution rather than a ban: his guess is that Rockstar is not confident it can verify ages solidly enough and pulled the content instead of risking a breach, and he expects adults could get access back once a proper check exists. That is his reading, not Rockstar's, and the company has drawn no link between the two.

One casualty is pure GTA Online trivia: the Lost Slamvan, which only ever came off the Lucky Wheel podium at odds of roughly one in twenty thousand, is now unobtainable in Australia. For GTA 6 the precedent is what counts. Rockstar has announced neither an online mode nor a casino for GTA 6, so there is nothing to switch off yet, but the game reaches Australia on November 19 under exactly these rules, and Rockstar has just shown how it prefers to comply: pull the feature for a whole country rather than build it a gate. Three and a half months before launch, that is the clearest signal we have about what Australian players should expect.