INDUSTRY INSIDER: MARK MCGUINNESS
Anyone can build a casino game now, the rulebook still assumes they can’t
Crash games are cooling in the markets that regulate best, just as AI and creator platforms hand game-making to anyone with an idea. The supply side has quietly outrun the people who police it, and that should concern every board in this industry, says Mark McGuinness.
I
have spent a fair bit of this year already, listening to operators talk about crash games as though they were still the future, and I am not convinced the players agree. While the industry argues about Aviator, a larger change has taken hold in how games are made at all. I will take the three in order, because they connect more than they may first appear.
THE CRASH-GAME PLATEAU First, the question people ask me privately: are crash games losing their appeal to players? The honest answer is that it depends entirely on where you look, because the published data pulls in two directions.
In the mature, regulated West, the shine is coming off. Casinoble’s analysis of Canadian players in Q2 2025 found that crash games, having risen sharply between 2020 and 2022, lost ground through 2024 and 2025, with feature-rich slots absorbing the engagement they shed. SOFTSWISS, which tracks more than 16,500 games across hundreds of operators, has watched Aviator behave like a fashion item rather than a
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sustainable category. It reached the network’s top three by the close of 2023, then slipped to sixth by early 2024. Slots still command north of 80 per cent of gross gaming revenue on that network, while crash titles accounted for under 1 per cent of the games offered in Europe. The other direction is just as clear. The same SOFTSWISS data puts crash games at nearly four per cent of titles in Latin America, and the firm’s own analysts describe the format as gaining traction in emerging markets and among younger players, with Aviator topping the revenue charts in South Africa. So, the story is not decline but divergence: crash games are maturing out of the West and migrating to regions where mobile-first, younger audiences are meeting them for the first time.
For anyone running a business on crash content, that is the strategic signal. Treat it as a regional and demographic play with a finite shelf life rather than a universal GGR growth engine. The category has done precisely what novelties do. It spiked, it spread, and in the markets that adopted it earliest, it is now settling.
WHEN THE GAMES STUDIO IS A PROMPT
Here is the part I suspect the industry is under-pricing: while we debate which game is hot or not, the cost of making a game at all has fallen through the floor.
In April 2025, just over a year ago, Stake launched ‘Stake Engine’, a remote gaming server built not for operators but for the creators who supply them. It hands an independent developer a front-end toolkit, a maths engine, balancing tools and, most consequentially, direct distribution into Stake’s player base, all for 10 per cent of gross gaming revenue.
Stake says the games built on it generated 3.31 billion dollars of turnover in the year before launch, and studios such as Paperclip Gaming have driven titles past a million bets in their first week. The traditional route to market, in which a studio negotiated with an aggregator, integrated, certified and then marketed over many months, has effectively been compressed into a single upload. Layer artificial intelligence on top, and the floor drops further still. In December 2025 a platform called SlotGPT launched claiming
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