Is Safe Marketing Holding iGaming Game Providers Back?

Tarun Morar

CEO of Jackpot.Studio

1. We came across your post where you wrote you made a bold claim. You wrote, “Provocative content goes viral. Everyone knows this except game providers.” Why do you think it’s only the game providers who are unaware of that? And if you do, then where have you seen the main problem, in your experience?

On the crypto operator side of the industry, there is substantial innovation happening. Tokens are being launched, original games are being pushed frequently, and entire systems are being built to challenge the fiat industry through aggressive rewards and acquisition strategies. That is innovation.

On the game provider side, however, they've somehow convinced themselves that changing a game's background and swapping out a few assets counts as innovation. How many versions of the same mechanic does the world need?

I understand why. Proven mechanics make money. Nobody gets fired for backing something that's worked before. But that's also how an industry becomes predictable.

The rest of the internet is having fun with weird, immediate, shareable content, while we're announcing another reskin of a fruit slot with even more bananas…

The main problem is that times are changing rapidly, but the content isn't keeping up. Users are craving content that matches the current culture of the internet. New game providers understand this. They're building for it and capitalising on it. For example, 155.io has done this very well.

2. But some of the biggest providers are still doing very well with the same systems, audiences and ways of working they have built over years. If that model is still delivering revenue, do they really need provocative marketing at all? Or is this your strategy to replace a marketing budget for your product?

If you're printing money selling the same games, congratulations. I genuinely mean that. Established providers have built incredible networks and earned their relationships. But a profitable business and an interesting product aren't necessarily the same thing.

If you need an enormous marketing budget to convince people your game is exciting, maybe the game was never exciting in the first place.

At Jackpot Studios, we try to build the marketing hook into the product itself. And because we own Jackpot.bet, we don't make these decisions in a vacuum. We understand what players do and what they want. We talk to our users and get feedback directly from them.

The concept is relatively simple. A funny idea gets a click, but a good game gives the player a reason to stay.

3. When we talk about provocative marketing, one of the first recent examples that comes to mind is Novig’s campaign with Sydney Sweeney. What was your take on it?

It's Sydney Sweeney. Anyone who's been on the internet or watched TV in the past two years knows about her. Of course people paid attention and had opinions about it.

Sex appeal sells. It has sold for years, and it will most likely continue to sell. It turns heads and gets people talking.

Did it get people talking about Novig? Absolutely. Was it a marketing masterclass? Not really.

But we're in an attention economy, and they certainly got the awareness the campaign was supposed to achieve.

What's interesting to track now is whether people will remember Sydney Sweeney or Novig, and whether that attention actually converts into customers.

4. A trend can appear and disappear in a couple of weeks, while a traditional game can take months to ship. Does the normal game-development cycle still make sense for the way attention works today?

I think the speed at which games can be produced is increasing rapidly, largely with the help of AI. I'm not saying AI can replace the entire workflow of a game studio, but it can certainly help determine whether an idea is worth pursuing.

A lot of the time, we come up with a silly game concept at a bar, in the shower, or while grabbing a coffee in the morning. By the end of that same day, we can have a complete game concept, prototyped and ready for the design and development phase.

We've shipped games at Jackpot Studios in just seven days. That's from the initial idea, through hundreds of billions of rounds of mathematical simulations, to a playable demo and then going live with operators.

And before anyone asks, we're not skipping the maths. It's rather important that we get that right the first time, with everything properly tested and bulletproof.

Not every game should take a week. But if the bureaucracy and approval processes of a large organisation prevent you from moving at the speed of the trend you're chasing, you have a problem.

We understand both operator and studio economics, which allows us to make decisions without 14 approval meetings.

5. Your own post, that we are talking about here was quite provocative. And iGaming is a very relationship-driven industry. Is all attention good attention, or do you ever worry that being this blunt can affect the relationships you already have, or the ones you may want to build in the future?

I don't believe all attention is good attention. There are obviously extremes, and I don't think I've even come close to scratching the surface of those.

What I'm sharing are my views on where the industry is today and, more importantly, where I think it's heading. People are always welcome to disagree. In fact, I'd rather spark a genuine debate than have everyone be a yes-man.

When it comes to business relationships, I think there's a difference between challenging an industry's thinking and disrespecting the people within it.

If someone decides that having a different opinion is enough to damage an existing or potential business relationship, I'd probably question how strong that relationship could have been in the first place.

You don't have to agree with someone to do good business with them. In fact, some of the best relationships come from challenging each other's thinking.

6. You also wrote about Duel and Stake Engines and young developers directly launching their games there. If a studio can get its games in front of players through a platform like that, how much of the traditional route can it actually skip? Do you still need years of brand building, events, operator relationships and aggregators, or are we moving towards a model where someone can build a studio, get distribution and start generating GGR much faster? Do you think it’s taking business away from traditional aggregators, or creating a completely new category?

It definitely changes the landscape a tad, but not completely. It makes things much more interesting and, in the process, will probably make a few established businesses uncomfortable.

Duel is putting out live-table content that would never survive a traditional marketing meeting. On the other hand, it's attracting enormous amounts of social attention.

Now, I don't necessarily agree with all their campaigns or all the debauchery that happens on that live table. But it's certainly provocative, and it gets attention.

With Stake Engine, smaller teams can build for the culture of the internet from day one. Some of those games will be slop. Easier access doesn't automatically make everyone talented.

But some will be exceptional, and those developers will be able to utilise the launchpad that Stake Engine provides.

This doesn't mean years of relationship building, brand development, or the aggregator model will suddenly become irrelevant. They're still core parts of the business and are necessary to truly reach product-market fit.

But it definitely provides a little cheat code for getting your foot in the door, something that used to be much harder because of hefty regulatory and development costs.

7. You mentioned that large providers often cannot be too edgy because their biggest operators are also their biggest clients. But I think we all might have witnessed some big names behind some really provocative bold games. So is this an opinion of yours or a fact? And if you firmly believe in this then are you indicating that depending on a few major customers can eventually make a provider less creative?

Of course it's an opinion, and perhaps I generalised a little too much. My point was really directed at the Tier 1 regulated markets, where legacy game providers still dominate and have spent years building incredibly valuable operator relationships.

When you've got millions in revenue tied to those relationships, you're naturally going to think twice before releasing something that might upset a major customer.

It's not necessarily a lack of intelligence or creativity. It's a commercial reality.

But there are exceptions, and we're starting to see some established providers push the boundaries.

One of my recent favourites is BGaming's Triple Nipple. It's slightly AI slop, but I actually love that they've gone there. It's weird, provocative, and gives people something to talk about.

And that's really my point. You don't have to reinvent the maths behind every game to innovate. Sometimes, it's about having the confidence to take a familiar mechanic and do something genuinely unexpected with it.