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


38 JUNE 2026 GIO


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


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84