As iGaming suppliers face growing pressure to deliver a steady flow of new titles, Evoplay is placing greater emphasis on relevance, retention, deeper operator collaboration, and the ecosystem built around its games. The company is also expanding its approach across promotional technology, loyalty, traffic acquisition, new gaming verticals and more selective geographic growth.
Ahead of SBC Summit Lisbon, Yogonet spoke with Diana Larina, CMO at Evoplay, about the company’s plans for the event, the role of its Game Changers Club, and how products such as Penalty Shoot-Out and Crimson Crown are informing its approach to long-term product development.
She also discusses how player data and local market dynamics are shaping Evoplay’s expansion strategy, and why the industry’s next phase may be defined less by content volume and more by relevance and commercial value.
SBC Summit is one of the key meeting points for the global iGaming industry. What story does Evoplay want to tell partners at this year’s event, and what will they see from the company in Lisbon?
This year, we are coming to SBC with the concept of the Evoplay Arena. Every arena has its headline attraction, and for us that is Penalty Shoot-Out, one of our flagship products and a strong example of how Evoplay can build a game concept with long-term commercial potential.
But an arena is never only about what happens on the field. It also has its home club and the people around it. For Evoplay, that is the Game Changers Club – a community we are building together with our partners. This is where the broader story of Evoplay becomes visible.
At SBC, we want to show not only what we create, but also how partners can work with us – from product collaboration and exclusive opportunities to marketing support, joint activations, market insights and deeper long-term partnerships.
The Game Changers Club represents this shift very well. It is about creating an environment where we and our partners can exchange knowledge, identify new opportunities, and build initiatives together.
And ultimately, that is how we see the next stage of Evoplay: not simply producing games and supplying content, but creating an ecosystem where stronger collaboration leads to stronger commercial results for both sides.
So when partners enter the Evoplay Arena in Lisbon, they will see three things at once: the product, the community around it, and the growth opportunities that come from being part of the Evoplay ecosystem.
Evoplay is increasingly positioning itself beyond the traditional role of a game provider. What does the broader Evoplay ecosystem look like today, and what is driving this evolution?
For us, the idea of an ecosystem is very practical. It means building multiple layers around the core gaming product that can help our partners improve acquisition, engagement, retention, and, ultimately, player value.
One of the biggest areas we are developing today is our promotional ecosystem. It is designed around long-term player loyalty rather than short-term spikes, and we are already seeing a positive long-term impact on user activity and GGR per player.
This year, for example, we launched a year-long promotional programme that combines several different engagement layers. These include Infinity Prize Drops, classic Prize Drops, and the Wheel of Fortune, and very soon we will introduce another mechanic that, to our knowledge, is not currently available in the same format from other providers.
The important point is that these mechanics are not isolated campaigns. They form a continuous engagement system around the games, giving operators more reasons to bring players back and creating additional value from the same audience over time.
Another important part of the ecosystem is Player Space, our player-focused retention and loyalty environment. On the B2B side, we are developing the Game Changers Club, which is designed to create a much closer community around our key partners and open more opportunities for collaboration.
We have also built Evoplay Affiliates as a separate major direction. Here, the focus is on traffic and attracting new players – understanding how our games themselves can become acquisition drivers for casinos, rather than only products that players interact with after they have already reached the operator.
And the ecosystem continues to expand beyond traditional casino content. We are actively developing areas such as Evoplay Lottery and Evoplay Bingo, which allow us to work with different audiences, formats and business models.
When we say Evoplay is moving beyond being simply a game provider, this is what we mean. We are building an interconnected ecosystem across content, promotional technology, loyalty, traffic acquisition, B2B partnerships and new gaming verticals. The game remains the starting point, but increasingly, our value comes from everything we can build around it.
As Evoplay’s offering expands, how is the company’s approach to partnerships evolving, and what role does the Game Changers Club play in building deeper relationships with key partners?
The biggest change is that we are moving away from purely transactional relationships. The traditional model is relatively simple: a provider creates a game, distributes it, and then moves on to the next release. But the most valuable partnerships today require much more dialogue.
We want to understand what our partners are trying to achieve, which audiences they aim to reach, what works on their platforms and where we can build something together.
The Game Changers Club is part of this approach. It gives us a framework for creating closer relationships with selected partners and opening the door to deeper collaboration, whether that is around launches, product opportunities, market insights or joint initiatives.
For me, the important word is partnership. For us, a real partnership begins when both sides move beyond the supplier-operator model and start thinking about growth as shared responsibility. It means combining our product expertise with the partner’s understanding of their audience, using data from both sides to make better decisions, and building initiatives where success is measured not by the number of games launched, but by the incremental value we create together.
The Penalty Shoot-Out series has continued to perform beyond the major football tournament period. What has its longevity taught you about creating event-driven content with lasting commercial potential?
Football is unique in that sense. It has one of the largest and most passionate fan communities in the world, and it is not a temporary trend – the sport existed long before this World Cup and will continue to bring people together long after it.
That is exactly why we saw such strong potential in the Penalty Shoot-Out. Of course, having the World Cup this year created an exceptional moment for the product. It gave us a powerful opportunity to attract new audiences and significantly increase attention around the series. What is more important, however, is that we have seen this new audience remain engaged even after the tournament ended. And that makes sense, because football does not stop with the World Cup.
There is a constant calendar of international competitions, domestic championships, local tournaments, club rivalries, and other football moments that create new reasons to activate the product throughout the year and in different markets.
For us, this has been an important observation: when you build around a cultural phenomenon with genuine long-term relevance, the major event should be viewed as an acquisition accelerator, not as the end of the product lifecycle.
The World Cup helped us bring a new audience into Penalty Shoot-Out, but the strength of football as a global passion gives us the opportunity to continue engaging that audience through many different local and international occasions. That is what turns event-driven content into a sustainable product franchise.
Crimson Crown has evolved from a successful individual title into a broader series. How do player behaviour and performance data inform decisions about when and how to develop a successful game concept further?
A successful game does not automatically need to become a series. The important question is understanding why it succeeded. We look at performance across different partners and markets, player behaviour, retention patterns and how consistently the concept performs over time. We also combine that data with qualitative feedback from operators.
Then we try to isolate what players are actually responding to. Is it the mechanic? The pacing? The visual concept? The bonus experience? The simplicity of the gameplay? With Crimson Crown, we saw sufficient evidence there was something bigger than an individual title. That creates an opportunity to develop the concept further while maintaining the elements players already recognise and enjoy.
At the same time, each new game has to justify its existence. The objective is not to create endless variations of a successful title. It is to build recognisable product families where every new release adds something meaningful.
As Evoplay expands its ecosystem, how is the company approaching its geographic growth, and what factors determine which markets offer the strongest opportunities?
We are becoming much more selective and analytical about geographic expansion. Entering a market simply because it is growing is not enough. We need to understand whether there is a genuine product-market fit for Evoplay.
That means looking at several layers simultaneously: player preferences, operator demand, regulatory conditions, competitive intensity, distribution opportunities and the performance of different game mechanics and themes within that market.
It also means listening closely to our local partners. One of the biggest mistakes a global supplier can make is assuming that a successful European product strategy can simply be replicated everywhere else. Our goal is not to launch the same portfolio in every market.
It is to understand where Evoplay has a competitive advantage and then adapt our product, commercial and marketing strategy accordingly. For us, geographic growth is becoming less about the number of markets we enter and more about the depth and quality of the opportunities we create within them.
As the industry looks towards 2027, what major shifts do you expect to shape the iGaming market, and how will they influence Evoplay’s priorities for the year ahead?
I think one of the biggest shifts will be from volume to relevance. The industry already produces an enormous amount of content. Operators do not necessarily need more games – they need titles that can compete for player attention, generate retention and have a clear commercial role within their portfolio.
That will make data increasingly important. Providers will need to become much better at understanding what products to build, for what audiences and markets rather than relying primarily on release volume.
At the same time, I expect relationships between operators and suppliers to become much deeper. More exclusive products, stronger localisation, joint product development and closer commercial collaboration will become increasingly important.
Retention will also remain critical as player acquisition becomes more competitive. That puts greater emphasis on engagement mechanics, recognisable product families and experiences that can create long-term value.
These trends are very closely aligned with where Evoplay is heading. For 2027, our focus is on building stronger product franchises, expanding into new formats and opportunities, becoming even more market- and data-driven, and continuing to develop the broader ecosystem around our games. Ultimately, we want Evoplay to be recognised not simply for the games we release, but for the value we can create around them.
