Attention is the new currency: NeverEnding's CEO on beating lobby fatigue

NeverEnding CEO Ihor Zarechnyi sits down with Casino Guru News to talk about a prevalent problem among online casino operators - the lobby fatigue, which is beginning to play an ever-increasing role in players' decision-making process and whether to stick to a brand or move onto other options.He discusses how the studio uses continuous, data-driven testing, from lobby placement to tournaments and promo rotations, to figure out what actually converts for each operator, and why staying involved after launch, not just shipping games and moving on, is core to how NeverEnding builds portfolios that scale sustainably.

Q: Ihor, it's great to catch up with you. Today's topic is one more and more operators are starting to take seriously: "lobby fatigue." Could you elaborate on what this issue actually involves, and why it matters for iGaming businesses?

Ihor: Sure. Lobby fatigue is what happens when choice stops being an advantage and turns into noise. Right now, a player opening a casino lobby can be looking at tens of thousands of games – some of the biggest aggregators are sitting at 30,000, 40,000, even 45,000+ titles. That's not a catalog anymore, that's a wall. And a player scrolling a wall doesn't feel excited, they feel lost. Lost players close tabs. That's the part operators feel directly, in retention numbers, even if they don't always call it "lobby fatigue" by name.

Q: Many operators have leaned into a "bigger is better" approach, hoping that more games in their lobbies would meaningfully impact player retention. Is that actually true?

Ihor: Not anymore, no. There was a point where a bigger catalog genuinely was a selling point – it signaled you had options, you had scale. That point has passed. Now the catalog size is table stakes, everyone has it, so it stopped differentiating anyone. What differentiates you now is whether a player can find something worth playing in the first thirty seconds. Volume without curation is just a bigger haystack.

Q: You've made the point that NeverEnding is about "understanding what players actually need." How do you go about pinpointing those specific needs?

Ihor: We entered the market at a point of peak saturation, so we never had the luxury other studios had years ago – of just adding volume and letting distribution do the work. We had to earn attention from day one, which forced a specific discipline into how we work: collect real player data, ask partners directly what's actually converting for them, and only then decide what belongs in a portfolio. Not what's popular in general – what's working for that specific operator, in that specific market. Every operator we work with is different, regardless of geo or traffic source, but the process to figure out what they need is the same.

Q: Can you share some strong examples of NeverEnding helping operators overcome lobby fatigue, or, at the very least, pointing them in the right direction?

Ihor: Here's the honest version: when we come into a casino, we already know there are dozens of similar games sitting next to ours. So the only real way to know if our game earns its place is to test it – put it in a normal, decent lobby position, and see what happens. No shortcuts, no assumptions. Once we see something actually working, that's when we start pushing it – a tournament, a dedicated campaign around that specific title, whatever gets it more visibility. We don't decide what deserves attention in advance. The data tells us, and then we act on it.

Q: NeverEnding describes itself as running a continuous strategy of testing. Is that testing tightly aligned with your business strategy, and does it come at a cost, in terms of how much, and how fast, you're able to scale?

Ihor: It's not a cost, it's the strategy. The mistake would be treating testing as overhead you do once and then move past. We change lobby placement, we run promo features, we test tournaments, we rotate genres – constantly, not as a one-time launch checklist. Yes, that means we move a little slower on any single decision than a studio that just ships and forgets. But we scale faster overall, because we're not carrying dead weight in the portfolio. Every operator we work with gets a portfolio that's actively maintained, not just delivered.

Q: Even when your studio can accurately predict what players need, isn't the real challenge getting your games into a place in the operator's lobby where they can actually be seen?

Ihor: That's exactly the challenge, and it's the one most studios underestimate. You can build the right game and still lose, if it launches into position forty-two of a lobby nobody scrolls past position ten. That's why we don't treat our job as "deliver the game and walk away." We stay involved in how it's surfaced – testing where it sits, what promo layer it gets, whether a tournament brings it back into view. Visibility isn't the operator's problem to solve alone. It's part of what we're accountable for too.

Q: There's been a lot of talk about bespoke content replacing, or at least becoming a bigger part of, the mass-market offer. Where does NeverEnding's technology stand on this?

Ihor: We're not chasing bespoke-for-its-own-sake. What we've built is a portfolio that's flexible enough to be positioned differently for different operators – the same underlying math, the same reliability, but adapted through data to what a specific player base actually responds to. That's a more honest version of "bespoke" than building one-off games for every partner, which doesn't scale and doesn't stay maintained. Our approach is: keep the core strong, and let the data decide how it's presented, tested, and repositioned. That's sustainable in a way that fully custom content isn't.

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