For years, “Northeast gaming” and “saturation” have been showing up in the same sentence.

Lately, they’ve been linked anew amid reports of declining casino revenues, missed projections, a near-bankruptcy and layoffs. When Pennsylvania regulators sought to auction a casino license last week, no one responded. And, in Massachusetts, a casino project proposed last month for Wareham, on Cape Cod’s doorstep, called only for slot machines and a $300 million investment, specifications that fell well short of the requirements of a 2011 state law calling for a full-scale casino in the area, one with table games and a minimum investment of $500 million.

“We’ve hit the saturation point,” said Richard McGowan, a Boston College professor who studies Northeast gaming.

July’s numbers told the tale.

Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun, for decades the region’s gaming anchors, reported double-digit declines in slot-machine revenue compared to a year ago. For both, it was the 13th straight month of year-over-year decreases, a stretch that began shortly before the debut of the $1 billion MGM Springfield, Massachusetts’ first resort casino.

MGM reported more lackluster results in the month, including the lowest table-games total of any full month in its brief history. That appeared to be attributable to competition from Encore Boston Harbor, the $2.6 billion facility Wynn Resorts opened on June 23. In July, Encore more than doubled MGM’s gaming revenues, generating more than five times as much table-games revenue as the Springfield casino.

In Rhode Island, Encore’s presence was blamed for plummeting revenues at Twin River Casino in Lincoln, where slots revenue fell 17 percent and table-games revenue was off by 34 percent. Twin River announced it was laying off 95 employees.

Although Encore's first full month was considered less than spectacular, the implications were apparent, McGowan said.

“It’s the only casino in the U.S. making more on tables than slots,” he said. “It’s a very different strategy. They’re after a much younger crowd, and they’re playing for high rollers. ... I have a feeling that in the long run, the table-gamers who used to play at Foxwoods, Mohegan Sun and Twin River will be staying at Encore.” 

McGowan said the scale of the proposed casino in Wareham reflects the developer’s estimation of the market. In unveiling the plan, the Notos Group, a partnership led by a Quincy, Mass., developer, said it would ask the state legislature to grant gaming regulators “the discretion to approve a gaming facility that reflects current market realities.”

A Brockton proposal also could vie for the lone resort casino license allotted for southeastern Massachusetts, if indeed regulators decide to award one. A long-stalled Taunton project pursued by the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, which had first dibs in the region, remains a remote possibility, too, at least officially.

Clyde Barrow, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley professor who has continued to analyze Northeast gaming since leaving UMass Dartmouth, believes the region is at least very close to being saturated with casinos.

“We’re probably there,” he said. “But saturation’s a moving target. Populations grow, incomes grow. What’s saturation today might not be two or three years down the road.”

Barrow said the fact that newly opened casinos frequently fail to meet pre-opening revenue projections is partly the result of overly optimistic forecasts. MGM Springfield, on track to generate less than two-thirds of the more than $400 million in first-year gaming revenue it was expected to provide, is a case in point. The four upstate New York resort casinos opened since 2016 also have fallen far short of projections. The largest of the four, the $1.2 billion Resorts World Catskills in Thompson, avoided bankruptcy earlier this month by agreeing to a takeover by its largest investor.

Naturally, casino operators seeking to secure licenses have a vested interest in inflating projections, Barrow said, and public officials can be too reluctant to challenge them.

Another reason recent projections have failed to pan out is that the forecasting models used to develop them are outdated, Barrow believes. Such models don’t account for changes in personal spending habits, particularly the percentage of disposable income consumers are willing to spend on gambling.

“The models have never been adjusted to the post-Great Recession reality,” Barrow said, referring to the economic downturn that extended from late 2007 to 2010.

Despite the economic recovery, spending on gambling has remained at recessionary levels, he said, perhaps in part because of people’s greater propensity to save money. Changing tastes also have been a factor. Millennials don’t gamble to the extent their parents do, and are more interested in casinos’ entertainment offerings than their slot machines.

Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun have reacted to the trend, diversifying their offerings in a bid to lessen their reliance on gaming revenues. They’re also banking on state authorization of sports betting, if only to enable them to remain on an equal footing with casinos in Rhode Island and upstate New York. Rhode Island upped the ante last week, with Twin River launching mobile sports betting on computers and phones anywhere in the state.

Ray Pineault, Mohegan Sun’s president and general manager, said his casino’s decline in July slots revenue was not solely due to competition from the Massachusetts casinos. In any given month, he said, the Mohegan Sun Arena entertainment lineup plays a major role in driving traffic to Mohegan Sun's slots and gaming tables.

“Last year, we did a lot more ‘A’ shows in July — U2, Britney Spears, Charlie Puth, the cast of ‘Saturday Night Live,’” he said. “This year, the shows were not of that magnitude.”

While nothing of Encore’s scale may be proposed for some time in the Northeast, the $300 million “satellite” casino the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes plan to build in East Windsor may be well suited to the market, Barrow and others believe. That project, meant to protect Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun from MGM Springfield’s impact, has been delayed for more than a year amid MGM's efforts to block it.

Legislation proposed this summer calls for the tribes to also invest $100 million in a casino project in Bridgeport.

“You have to be right-sized for the market,” said Bill Newby, an investment banker and president of Los Angeles-based TFA Capital Partners. “When you layer in more and more casinos in a small market, strategies become defensive. It’s a zero-sum game. In large part, that is New England.”

“It’s really smart to build something small, then expand if it works,” he said.

b.hallenbeck@theday.com