Oleg Rezanovich: "Your lobby is full of providers' hits. Where are your hits?"

Bubble Gaming is an international game development studio founded in Estonia in 2024. With a portfolio of 45 games, more than 80 casino partners and a new release almost every week. Even so, the company is betting on more than the size of its catalogue — it builds exclusive games for individual operators and funds them entirely itself. Oleg Rezanovich, CEO and founder of Bubble Gaming, explains why a large catalogue is no longer enough to stand out, how the exclusive development model works, and what 127 days of Joker's Lucky Box at Lemon Casino have shown.

Q: Two years in, you have 45 games, more than 80 casino partners, and a release almost every week. At that pace, why did you decide to bet on more than the shared catalogue and start building exclusives for individual operators?

We have a strong team drawn from very different backgrounds: alongside game development specialists, there are people with experience in business, journalism, film, advertising and PR. Like any start-up, we began by studying the market systematically — attending industry expos and going through everything available in the public domain. We quickly realised how closed this industry is: for much of that first year we could only watch it from the outside and build our own understanding of how it works.

Our initial bet was on volume and variety, from visual style and mechanics through to game concepts. We deliberately avoided copying the leading studios, which is what many new providers do. But ambition alone isn't enough: matching the top studios and offering the market something genuinely different is hard.

Operators and aggregators kept asking us the same question: "What makes you different? Why do we need another provider?" At some point I put the question back to one of the casinos: "What makes you different? Why should a player choose you?"

That conversation is where our new concept began: exclusive games built for a specific operator. Today Bubble Gaming has more than a dozen such projects in its portfolio.

Q: A typical casino lobby now holds thousands of slots, and many white label brands look almost identical. Why, in your view, has the "buy everything the providers offer" strategy stopped working? What does it cost the operator?

I wouldn't say it has stopped working: a broad catalogue is still essential, and players expect new titles. The market keeps growing — the internet audience adds roughly 250 million users a year, and the iGaming audience grows with it. Supply grows faster still: SOFTSWISS alone gives operators access to more than 40,000 active games from 300+ providers.

So "where do we find another thousand games?" is a solved problem for casinos. The real question is which of those thousands their players actually need. When competing catalogues are virtually identical, bonuses and free spins become the main retention tool. But every brand runs the same bonus mechanics, and free spins on games available in every other lobby build no attachment to the brand: the player simply moves to whoever has the better offer that day. For the operator, that means permanent spending to retain an audience that stays disloyal.

Q: You offer casinos an exclusive game at your own expense. Where is the economics in that for Bubble Gaming? And what exactly does the operator get: how long does the game stay exclusive to them, who owns the rights, and can RTP, visuals and theme be tailored to the brand and the market?

We fund development in full. The rights to the game stay with the studio, and the operator receives exclusive placement for an agreed period — typically one to three years, depending on how active the operator is and on the terms of the specific project. Our model is revenue share, and the commercial terms on an exclusive are considerably better than those on our general content portfolio. For us, it is a chance to build a product together with the operator and to keep developing it commercially afterwards.

The operator gets a product built around the interests of its own audience, with the mechanics and visual concepts its players prefer. The casino then runs its bonus campaigns on its own game, and its advertising rests on an exclusive product that sets it apart rather than on someone else's hit.

All of the potential risk therefore sits with Bubble Gaming. The operator invests no money and builds no in-house game development infrastructure — its contribution is audience data and involvement in the project.

We are willing to go further. On an exclusive game we can, for example, waive our share of the revenue for the first month and put it into marketing the game itself. For the operator, that is additional promotional budget at no extra cost — we have already agreed to work this way with several partners.

Q: Walk us through the process from brief to launch. What do you ask the operator for at the start, how long does development take, and how does the team — mathematicians, artists, 3D animators, sound designers, QA — combine custom projects with weekly releases?

The key point is that the operator doesn't receive an existing game from our catalogue with its logo on it, but a product designed around its audience. So the work starts with data: what the operator's players prefer, which themes and mechanics work for them, how the lobby is organised, which games deliver the best results. In simple terms, we look at the casino's top 50 games and design one that should work for that particular audience. The operator already holds this data; our job is to turn it into a technical brief.

After that it is a standard production cycle: concept, maths, art and sound, QA, launch. Visual style and mechanics are adapted to the audience at every stage. On average, producing an exclusive takes three to six weeks — and that is with our regular release schedule running in parallel, as the studio continues to ship games for the general portfolio.

The result is a product the operator can build its own positioning on: the game can be used in CRM communications, tournaments, bonus mechanics and advertising campaigns. Games from the shared catalogue can be promoted too, of course, but dozens of competitors are promoting them at the same time. An exclusive works for your brand alone.

Q: One of your cases is Joker's Lucky Box for Lemon Casino. The game sits in the Lemon's specials section, next to exclusives from far larger providers. Why the joker theme and the classic 3×3 format with five lines and medium volatility? How did you factor in Lemon Casino's audience?

Joker's Lucky Box is one of our most successful cases. As I said, the task was not to take an existing Bubble Gaming title and put Lemon Casino branding on it, but to create a product that fits naturally into the operator's environment. We settled on the theme together with the Lemon Casino team, based on data about their players' preferences. The casino has a separate Joker category, and its most popular games include a great deal of classic content. So the joker theme was not our preference — it was what this audience already responds to.

The same principle shaped the remaining parameters: a familiar theme, a simple format, straightforward game logic. A 3×3 grid, five lines, medium volatility, 94% RTP and a maximum multiplier of x1600. The goal was not to surprise players with an unfamiliar mechanic, but to give them a format they know in a product available only at this casino.

Q: The game went live on 15 May, and almost four months have passed. How does it perform against non-exclusive slots in the same lobby — conversion to first bet, retention, session length, turnover? And how does Lemon Casino use it in promotions: free spins, tournaments, CRM campaigns?

We measure the game against the rest of our portfolio with this operator. The figures cover the first 127 days, as of 18 September:

• 9,969 unique players — more than any other game of ours at this casino.
• 88 days in first place by turnover and by player numbers among our games at the casino. The next game in the portfolio managed eight.
• Turnover holds. In its fourth month the game still generates 97% of its first-month turnover. A typical slot retains only 1–15% by that point, and loses most of it as early as the second month.
• Players come back. Of those who opened the game in the first 18 days after release, 14.8% were still playing it in the fourth month. The median across our other games is 0.5% — almost thirty times lower.
• Engagement. The game runs twice as many sessions as the next game in our portfolio, with session depth above the portfolio average.
• New audience. For 3,621 players, Joker's Lucky Box was the first game they played at the casino; 25.5% of them were still active 30 days or more later.

Lemon Casino has included the game in free spin campaigns — the peak weeks in July and August line up with them. What matters is that those campaigns brought in paying players: the share of players who placed no real-money bets in a given month was only 0.2–3.1%.

Retention is what matters most to us. Almost any game can produce a spike after release; promotion and curiosity see to that. Turnover still sitting at first-month levels four months on means the game has become a regular fixture for the audience, rather than something that simply burned through a marketing budget.

And this is not a one-off. The games we released with this operator between May and September 2026, built on the casino's analytics, attract on average twice as many players in their first 30 days as our earlier releases, and bring players back almost twice as often — even though the casino's catalogue has grown considerably over the year.

Q: Let's turn to analytics. Before building a slot, you run research with independent people who have no gaming preferences, including people who don't play at all. Why them rather than regular players? How is the research set up?

The principle is close to the way cosmetics are tested: at the first stage you need an unbiased reaction, not an expert opinion. An experienced player judges a new game through the lens of the products they already know, and effectively tells you how similar it is to what they have seen before. We want to capture the first reaction: what draws interest, what irritates, at which point attention drops.

The system is still in testing. But it is already clear that it reduces risk at a stage when the main resources have not yet gone into the project. Combined with operator data, it gives us a basis for designing a game that is more likely to find its audience.

Q: This interview is read by aggregators as well as operators. How does the exclusive model fit with working through aggregators, and what does Bubble Gaming offer them? How quickly can an operator or aggregator go live with your games, given direct and reverse integration, certified RNG and 24/7 support?

The exclusive model doesn't compete with aggregators; it adds to what they offer: the aggregator gets unique content that nobody else has, rather than one more game in the catalogue. That is an argument for winning new operators and for strengthening relationships with existing clients.

Our work doesn't end when the game is delivered. Integration, QA, technical support and post-launch analytics are as much part of the product as the game itself: we track performance, analyse player behaviour and refine the product on that basis.

Q: The central message of this interview is: stop buying everything providers offer, build your own hit. What would you say to an operator who hesitates and sees an exclusive as a luxury for big brands? Where should a conversation with you start? And what is next for Bubble Gaming?

It isn't a question of budget: operators have the resources, and building a slot is not the kind of expense that calls for a special decision. It is a question of positioning. If your lobby holds the same thousands of games as your competitors', catalogue size stops being an advantage. The advantage is having something nobody else has.

An exclusive game is a practical business tool for exactly that: your own product for promotions, tournaments, CRM and advertising, built on data about your players. Putting it to work in your marketing campaigns strengthens the casino's position in the market directly. The Lemon Casino case shows that a product like this can become one of a casino's core games and hold its results for months rather than weeks.

I would suggest starting with a single meeting. Show us who your players are, which games perform best for you and how you want to differ from your competitors — and we will come back with a game concept for your audience. Bubble Gaming funds the development, and we are ready to put the first month's revenue into promoting the game.

Our plans are to scale the exclusive line, develop the analytics system and grow our own portfolio. We keep releasing new games and developing existing mechanics, while building a model in which the operator is not a buyer of content but a partner in creating it. For a casino, its own game is a sales, marketing and differentiation tool.

So my message to operators is simple: YOUR LOBBY IS FULL OF PROVIDERS' HITS. WHERE ARE YOUR HITS? Stop buying everything providers offer. Let's build your own hit.


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