$1.58 billion. That’s the unfathomably large sum that a Florida resident won last month in the largest Mega Millions jackpot in U.S. history. Just a few weeks ago, they marked five numbers on a seemingly ordinary piece of paper. Now, they belong in the three-comma club.
By some estimates, the odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are 1 in 302.6 million. But that doesn’t appear to deter people around the world, who spent $348.3 billion on lottery tickets in 2022. Despite the life-changing nature of the prizes, however, Mega Millions tickets don’t make up the majority of lottery sales in the U.S. Nor do Power Ball tickets, or Keno games, or any kinds of state-specific lottery games.
Nearly half of that sum actually goes towards scratch tickets—those extravagant instant lottery cards that line the check-out booths of your local 7-Eleven or newsstand. That’s $113.7 billion spent on highly designed cardboard games that use color-shifting inks, patented printing processes—and a heavy dose of behavioral psychology—to convince you to buy a ticket, and another, and another.
In the U.S., most scratch cards are made by just three companies: Scientific Games, Pollard Banknote, and IGT. Scientific Games is the only company headquartered in the U.S. (the other two are Canadian and Italian, respectively) and the world’s largest producer of instant scratch games, supplying 130 lotteries in 50 countries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s also the one that launched the U.S.’s first instant scratch game almost five decades ago, but more on that later.
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