The unofficial ‘handbook for new brand survival’

The igaming industry is a diverse ecosystem, accommodating operations of all scales and types. However, the frequent news of brands failing and redundancies serves as a sobering reminder of the industry’s challenges.

To be clear, you can’t avoid trouble completely – that’s just not how it works. Redundancies often result from failing to achieve profitability, which can stem from a brand’s origin story or its current market position. So, here’s a reminder to recognise what might cause trouble at your desk:

1. Product focus, acquisition oversight

When product development overshadows acquisition efforts in igaming, companies risk creating an excellent brand that struggles to attract players. Such brands invest heavily in creating engaging user experiences and effective gamification, often based on the assumption that superior features alone will attract and retain players.

This product-centric approach frequently leads to misreading market signals and an imbalanced acquisition strategy. The complexities of planning and managing player acquisition are underestimated, resulting in inadequate preparation.

This imbalance often happens with founders who have strong product backgrounds and have previously led commercially successful product launches without direct responsibility for overall commercial profitability.

2. Acquisition pros, retention woes

A significant number of successful acquisition experts transition to brand ownership, bringing traffic-driving expertise to their own brands. As the saying goes, where you start often dictates the challenges you’ll face.

These operators excel at attracting players – leveraging their background in affiliate marketing, acquisition, media buying or SEO to drive initial traffic and conversions – but struggle to keep them engaged.

The complexities of operating a fully fledged casino brand – including product quality, user experience and long-term retention strategies – often prove to be unfamiliar territory in execution, although they are familiar with it in theory.

3. Technical excellence, legacy burdens, next guy’s problem

Technology debt often becomes the silent killer of scale-ups in igaming. It typically begins innocuously – a few shortcuts here, some quick fixes there. However, this approach can quickly spiral into a significant problem.

As the debt accumulates, operators may find themselves losing ground to newer, more technologically agile competitors. Development teams become bogged down maintaining an increasingly complex system, rather than innovating and improving the product.

One reason for this is short-term focus. Leaders, driven by quarterly or yearly targets, often neglect long-term sustainability. Without investor scrutiny, they may leave mounting technical debt for their successors to handle.

4.  Forecasting failures, overconfident scaling, regulatory curveballs

Let’s call this what it really is: running out of money. Sometimes it’s because someone didn’t pay attention to operational overheads or changing performance indicators like acquisition costs and player values. Other times, it’s because there was insufficient due diligence in setting targets.

These challenges can manifest in various forms: unexpected regulatory fines, competition from well-funded rivals or simply exhausting available capital due to overconfident expansion. The root cause often traces back to a lack of foresight in financial planning and investment strategies, coupled with an unrealistic assessment of market potential.

5. Operational ostriches, complexity, houses of brands

Unfortunately, houses of brands often see the highest redundancy cycles. Multi-brand operations are inherently complex. The complexity increases due to constant leadership changes, lack of oversight on the impact of execution or simply oscillating from constant central operational structure to localised decision-making versus centralised decision-making to localised execution.

Bhopendra Rathore is the product marketing and CRM director at Straight Talk iGaming. With more than a decade in the industry, he specialises in full-stack product development, brand marketing and customer retention strategies for startups and scale-ups.