Mapping operators, platforms, aggregators, studios, affiliates and payment providers, and where the margin sits at each link.
In this lesson:
- Map the full iGaming value chain from game studio to player and identify the role of each participant
- Explain how revenue share flows from player losses back through the chain and what each party captures
- Distinguish between build, buy and licence decisions in platform strategy and articulate the trade-offs
- Recognise how consolidation and vertical integration have reshaped bargaining power across the chain
Following the money backwards
The clearest way to understand how this industry is organised is to start with a single unit of revenue and trace where it goes.
A player deposits £100 and plays slots. Over a session, they stake and restake that balance many times, and eventually lose £40 of it. That £40 is gross gaming revenue (Britain's Gambling Commission calls it gross gambling yield: stakes less the prizes and winnings paid out), and it is the pool from which every company in the chain is paid.
From that £40, gaming duty is deducted at whatever rate the jurisdiction sets: in Britain, Remote Gaming Duty on profits from online gaming rose from 21% to 40% on 1 April 2026. The game studio that built the slot takes its revenue share. If the game reached the operator through an aggregator, the aggregator takes a slice as well. The platform provider takes its fee, usually a percentage of revenue, sometimes alongside fixed fees. If the player was introduced by an affiliate, the affiliate takes its share. Payment processing costs come out. Then the operator absorbs the cost of the bonus it gave the player to acquire them, its own marketing, its staff, its technology, its compliance function and its customer support.
What remains is profit. In a competitive regulated market, it is a considerably smaller number than most people outside the industry assume.
This exercise establishes the essential point of this lesson. Every participant in the chain is being paid from the same pool, and that pool is created entirely by player losses. When you read that an operator has strong margins or that a supplier is under pricing pressure, you are reading about how that pool is being divided.
The operator
The operator sits at the centre of the chain, and its position is defined by three things it holds that nobody else does.
It holds the licence. The gambling licence is issued to a specific legal entity, which becomes accountable to the regulator for everything that happens on the site, including things done by third parties on its behalf: in Britain, licensees are responsible for the actions of third parties they contract with. If a game supplied by a studio malfunctions, or an affiliate advertises irresponsibly, or a payment provider handles funds improperly, the regulator's enforcement action lands on the operator. This is a critical asymmetry and it explains a great deal of operator behaviour, particularly the intensity of supplier due diligence and affiliate monitoring.
It holds the customer relationship. The player has an account with the operator, deposits with the operator, and complains to the operator. The operator therefore owns the data: who the customer is, what they play, how much they deposit, what promotions they respond to and what risk indicators they display. In an industry where the ability to identify and retain valuable customers is the primary competitive skill, that data is the core asset.
It holds the liability. When a player wins, the operator pays. On the casino side this is a mathematical certainty absorbed into normal operations. On the sportsbook side it is a genuine financial risk requiring active management, which is why sportsbook operators run trading desks.
Because the operator carries all three, it captures the largest single share of revenue and bears the largest share of risk. Everything else in the chain is, in one way or another, a service supplied to the operator.
Game studios
Game studios design and build the games. On the casino side this is a large and creatively competitive supplier market containing everything from major listed suppliers producing dozens of titles a year to small studios building a handful.
A studio's work involves three disciplines that have to cohere. Mathematics defines the return to player percentage, the volatility profile, the hit frequency and the structure of the bonus features. Art and audio define whether the game feels appealing enough that a player chooses it from a lobby containing thousands of alternatives. Engineering delivers it as a stable, fast, mobile-first product that behaves correctly under regulatory scrutiny and passes testing laboratory certification in every market it is deployed in.
Studios are paid predominantly through revenue share on the gross gaming revenue their games generate. Evolution, for example, reports that most of its revenue is commission calculated as a percentage of operators' winnings from its games, and DraftKings describes the casino content it licenses from suppliers as subject to standard revenue-sharing agreements. The percentage varies with the studio's bargaining power, the exclusivity of the arrangement and the commercial context, and premium suppliers with genuinely differentiated content command materially better terms than commodity ones.
This model has a significant consequence. Because a studio only earns when its games are played, and because lobby placement drives play, the relationship between studios and operators is a continuous negotiation over visibility. Promotional placement, inclusion in tournaments, featured positioning and exclusivity windows are all traded, and this commercial layer sits on top of the pure content relationship.
Live casino is a specific variant worth noting. Because it requires physical studios, dealers, cameras and streaming infrastructure, live casino has much higher fixed costs than random number generator content, which has produced a far more concentrated supplier market with a small number of dominant players. Evolution reports a leading position in live casino in both Europe and North America, with around 2,000 live tables at the end of 2025.
Aggregators
If an operator wanted to offer four thousand games from three hundred studios, and each studio required a separate technical integration, the engineering burden would be prohibitive. Aggregators exist to solve exactly this.
An aggregator integrates studios once, into its own system, and then offers the combined catalogue to operators through a single connection. The operator builds one integration and gains access to everything the aggregator carries. New games from any of those studios then arrive without further engineering work.
Aggregators are paid by taking a slice of the revenue share that would otherwise pass to the studio, or by adding a margin on top. Either way, the operator accepts a smaller net position in exchange for avoiding integration cost, and the studio accepts a smaller share in exchange for distribution it would struggle to achieve alone.
The strategic tension here is that aggregators sit between studios and their customers, which means they accumulate both data and bargaining power. Large studios with strong brands often prefer direct integrations with major operators precisely to avoid that intermediation, while smaller studios depend on aggregation entirely because no operator would build a bespoke integration for a studio with four titles.
Platform providers
The platform, frequently called the player account management system, is the operational core of a gambling business. It handles registration and identity verification, the player wallet, deposits and withdrawals, bonus logic, game session management, responsible gambling tooling, regulatory reporting feeds, and the reporting layer the business runs on.
Operators face a genuine strategic choice here, and it is one of the most consequential decisions in the business.
Building in-house gives full control over the roadmap, no revenue share leaking to a third party, and the ability to differentiate through product. It requires substantial and permanent engineering investment, and it means the operator itself must build compliance features for every market it enters. This is generally viable only at scale.
Licensing a turnkey platform means paying a supplier, usually as a percentage of revenue, for a system that already exists and already carries certifications for multiple jurisdictions. The operator keeps its own licence and its own customer relationship, but its product roadmap is partly determined by the supplier's priorities. Pricing is rarely a single percentage: the turnkey sportsbook supplier Kambi, for instance, charges operators fixed fees, fees based on the number of live events offered and a revenue share, with lower commission tiers for some partners at higher revenue levels.
White label goes further. The brand operates under the licence of the platform provider, which becomes the regulated entity. In Britain the Commission states that responsibility for compliance on white-labelled sites sits with the licence holder and cannot be transferred, and describes the relationship with the brand as closer to a marketing agreement. The brand can launch quickly with modest capital, but it does not control the licence, frequently does not own the player data outright, and gives up a considerable share of revenue. White label is a viable route to market for affiliates moving into operation and for brands testing a market, and a poor long-term structure for anyone intending to build enduring value.
The decisive factor in all of this is switching cost. Migrating a live platform means moving player accounts, balances, histories, bonuses and regulatory records without disrupting service or breaching licence conditions. It is expensive, slow and risky enough that a substantial number of operators remain on platforms they would not choose again. When assessing any platform decision, the honest question is not which system is best today but which one you are prepared to live with for a decade.
Affiliates
Affiliates are marketing partners who send players to operators and are paid for the players who convert. The model developed early in online gambling's history, and it has remained structurally important ever since.
The three standard commercial models each allocate risk differently. Revenue share pays the affiliate a percentage of the net revenue generated by the players it refers, often for the lifetime of those players. Cost per acquisition pays a single fixed sum for each referred player. Hybrid deals combine an upfront payment with an ongoing share. The listed affiliate Better Collective reports its revenue under these models, alongside subscription and sponsorship income: under revenue share it receives a share of the revenue a sportsbook generates from each player it referred, and under a hybrid deal it receives a one-time upfront fee for each new player, then revenue share only on the amount by which the accumulated share exceeds those upfront fees. In 2025 revenue share made up 47% of its revenue and CPA 24%.
Revenue share aligns interests well, because an affiliate earning from lifetime revenue has a direct incentive to send genuinely valuable players rather than volume. It also creates a large, permanent deduction from operator margin, and lifetime revenue share obligations on a mature player base can represent a significant liability.
Affiliates matter to compliance as much as to marketing. Regulators in most serious jurisdictions hold the operator responsible for how its affiliates advertise, which means an affiliate making a misleading bonus claim or targeting a prohibited audience creates a regulatory problem for the operator, whose British licence conditions require its contracts to let it terminate affiliates that breach an advertising code. The affiliate is not off the hook either: in Britain both the brand and the affiliate are responsible under the advertising code, and in Pennsylvania affiliates must be certified or registered with the regulator. This has driven substantial investment in affiliate monitoring and in the contractual terms governing these relationships.
Payment providers
Payments deserve their own place in the chain because gambling is treated as a high-risk category by the financial industry, which makes something that ought to be routine into a specialist discipline. Card networks set their own operating rules for gambling, and DraftKings, for example, has agreed to reimburse its payment processors for fines the card networks impose if it or its users break them.
An operator typically works with acquirers who process card transactions, alternative payment method providers covering bank transfers and local schemes, and often a payment orchestration layer that routes transactions intelligently between them. Each takes a fee, and the combined cost of payments is a meaningful line item. Some methods are closed off by regulation: in Britain, licensees must not accept payment for gambling by credit card, a ban in force since 14 April 2020.
The commercially critical metric is acceptance rate. If a deposit attempt fails, an operator has usually already paid to acquire that customer, and a failed first deposit often means the customer is lost entirely. Small improvements in acceptance therefore translate directly into revenue, which is why operators invest heavily in routing logic and in maintaining multiple providers per market.
Testing laboratories, data suppliers and the rest
Several smaller categories complete the picture. Testing laboratories certify that games and platforms meet the technical standards of each jurisdiction, a mandatory and recurring cost. In Britain, a new game can only be released once an approved test house has tested it and the report has gone to the Commission, and an annual games testing audit by an approved test house applies on top. Sports data suppliers provide the live feeds and settlement data that sportsbooks depend on, a concentrated market: DraftKings names Sportradar and Genius Sports among the providers it relies on to settle bets, and warns that if one withdrew it might not secure similar terms elsewhere. Compliance and risk software vendors supply identity verification, anti-money laundering screening, affordability data and responsible gambling monitoring tools. Customer engagement platforms handle the messaging and campaign infrastructure that CRM teams run on.
None of these individually reshapes the industry. Collectively they represent a substantial ongoing cost, and each is a point at which a percentage of that original £40 is claimed.
What is actually negotiated in a supplier deal
Describing the chain in terms of revenue share percentages makes the commercial relationships sound simpler than they are. In practice, several terms are negotiated alongside the headline rate, and they often matter more than the rate itself.
Exclusivity and release windows. A studio may grant an operator first access to a new title for a defined period. The operator gains a differentiated product to promote; the studio gains guaranteed prominence at launch, which is when a game's long-term performance is largely determined.
Minimum guarantees. A supplier may require a minimum payment regardless of performance, particularly where it is committing engineering resource to a bespoke integration or a customised product. This shifts risk onto the operator.
Promotional commitments. Contracts frequently specify placement obligations, such as inclusion in the new games section for a defined period, or participation in tournaments and campaigns. This is the contractual form of the visibility negotiation described above.
Jurisdictional coverage. A supplier's content is only usable where it is certified. Deals specify which markets are included, and expanding into a new jurisdiction may require fresh certification, additional cost and a renegotiation.
Data and reporting rights. Who sees what performance data, at what granularity, and how frequently. Suppliers want visibility into how their games perform; operators regard detailed player behaviour data as proprietary.
Liability and compliance warranties. Because the operator carries regulatory accountability, contracts allocate responsibility for certification failures, game malfunctions and technical defects. When a game pays incorrectly, whether through a mathematical error or a display fault, the question of who compensates affected players and who bears any regulatory penalty is answered by these clauses.
Reading the chain when assessing a company
A practical use of this map is that it lets you interpret what a company actually is, which is frequently different from how it describes itself.
Ask first where the licence sits. A brand operating under someone else's licence is a marketing business, not an operator, however it presents itself. Ask next who owns the player data and the customer relationship, because that determines whether the business is accumulating a durable asset or renting access to one.
Then ask which parts of the chain the company owns versus rents. A group that has built its own platform and acquired its own studios has a materially different cost structure, and materially different margins, from one paying revenue share at every link. In a market where gross margins are compressing, that difference compounds year after year.
Finally, ask how concentrated its dependencies are. An operator relying on a single aggregator for most of its content, a single payment provider in a key market, or a single affiliate for a large share of its acquisition has a fragility that will not appear in any revenue figure but will appear immediately if that relationship fails.
Why everything is being integrated
The dominant structural trend across the chain over the past decade has been vertical integration, and the reason is margin.
As regulated markets have matured, gross margins have compressed. Tax rates have risen, Britain's 2026 increase in Remote Gaming Duty being one example. Compliance costs have increased. Bonus effectiveness has fallen as players have become more sophisticated. Marketing has become more expensive as more licensed competitors chase the same customers. In that environment, every revenue share paid to a third party becomes a target.
The response has been for large groups to acquire the links in the chain they were previously renting. Operators have bought or built game studios so that proprietary content generates full margin rather than a share of it: Flutter, for example, reports five in-house gaming studios and a shift to in-house developed games to differentiate itself. They have bought or built platforms to stop paying platform fees: DraftKings, which completed a business combination with SBTech in April 2020, says it has endeavoured to own the technology in-house for any critical component. The traffic runs both ways: Flutter, one of the largest operators, also sells pricing and risk management services to other businesses in the sector, so a single group can sit on both sides of the B2B and B2C divide at once.
The result is a chain that is theoretically modular and increasingly, in practice, owned end to end by a small number of very large companies. For anyone entering the industry, this matters because it determines where the leverage sits in any negotiation, and because it explains why a company described as an operator may also be your competitor as a supplier.
Key takeaways
- The operator holds the licence, the customer and the liability, which is why it captures the largest share of revenue and also carries the largest share of the risk.
- Aggregators exist because integration cost is the binding constraint on casino content. They solve a technical problem and are paid a slice of margin for doing so.
- Platform decisions are among the most consequential an operator makes, because migrating a live platform is expensive, slow and risky enough that many operators simply never do it.
- Affiliates are paid from the same revenue pool as everyone else, and lifetime revenue share makes them a significant, long-running deduction from an operator's gross margin.
- Vertical integration has become the dominant strategic response to margin compression, with large groups buying studios, platforms and affiliate assets to keep more of the chain in-house.