The B2B economy
Most of the companies in online gambling never meet a player. They sell to operators, and their businesses are shaped by that fact: their customers are hundreds of licensed companies rather than millions of consumers (Evolution reported about 870 operator customers at the end of 2025), their revenue is a share of those customers' revenue, their sales cycles are long, and their fortunes rise with the number of regulated markets they are certified in. This lesson takes each supplier type and explains its model.
Game studios
A studio designs, builds and certifies slots and table games and distributes them to operators, directly or through aggregators. The economics:
Revenue is a share of the GGR its games generate at each operator, usually after agreed deductions such as gaming taxes and bonuses: Games Global said in its 2024 US listing prospectus, later withdrawn, that its revenue is predominantly a percentage of the GGR operators earn from its games. The rate is set contract by contract: in the same prospectus Games Global put its own share at between the high single digits and the low-to-mid teens of a percent of that GGR.
Costs are development (a slot takes a team months), mathematics and compliance (certification per market, RTP variants), marketing to operators, and, for the largest, promotional tournaments and network jackpots that operators run across their games.
Distribution is the constraint. A studio with great games and no promotion earns nothing, because operators promote the studios that drive their revenue and players find games through lobby placement. The largest studios negotiate placement; smaller ones pay aggregators a share of their share to be carried at all. Even a large studio depends on intermediaries: Games Global, which supplied more than 350 operators, reached many through B2B resellers and warned investors that those resellers may favour competitors' games.
Hits make the business. A single title that becomes a category (the mechanic that every other studio copies) can earn a disproportionate share of a studio's revenue for years, and the market for studios is a market for hit-makers.
Live casino studios
Covered in depth in the Live Casino Operations course. The model in one paragraph: high fixed cost (studios, dealers, streaming), near-zero marginal cost per operator, commission calculated as a percentage of the operator's winnings from the games, dedicated tables and environments sold for a monthly fee as the premium product, and a market led by one supplier because scale wins. Evolution, the leader, says live casino needs volume and operational excellence to be profitable and that the RNG market is more fragmented.
Sportsbook suppliers
A sportsbook supplier provides the betting engine and, in the managed model, the pricing and trading. Revenue is a share of betting GGR plus fees: Kambi, a listed supplier, charges fixed fees, fees linked to the number of live events offered and a revenue share of operators' GGR less deductible costs such as tax and capped bonuses. The economics turn on the cost of data (a significant bought-in cost, though at Kambi in 2025 data supplier costs of €19.6 million were about a third of its €56.4 million staff costs), the trading team (a managed service prices a very large number of events for every client), and the technology (in-play at scale). The supplier's product is its pricing quality, and its liability for pricing errors is defined in the contract. The largest operators build or buy their own sportsbooks to keep the margin and control the product: DraftKings combined with the supplier SBTech in 2020 and says it aims to own in-house the technology for any critical component. That caps the supplier market at the mid-tier and the regulated-market entrants that need speed.
Platforms and aggregators
Platform providers license the PAM and the surrounding systems for setup fees, monthly fees and revenue share. Their economics are those of enterprise software with a gambling overlay: long sales cycles, high switching costs, certification per market, and margins that depend on how much of the revenue share they can hold as operators grow. Aggregators sit between studios and operators, earning a slice of the studios' revenue share for one integration and the reconciliation that goes with it; their value is breadth and their risk is disintermediation as large operators integrate the top studios directly.
Data and integrity companies
Sports data companies license official data rights from leagues (the cost), collect and distribute the data and derived odds to operators (the revenue, on subscription and revenue share: in 2025 67% of Sportradar's revenue came from fixed-fee recurring arrangements and 33% from revenue sharing), and sell integrity monitoring to sports bodies (a second revenue line and a relationship that helps win the rights). Two listed companies hold many of the biggest rights: Sportradar, whose long-term partners include the NBA, MLB, NHL and UEFA, and Genius Sports, which distributes official betting data for the NFL and the English Premier League. Their rights deals with the major leagues make them gatekeepers of in-play betting in those sports, and their pricing to operators reflects it. The risk on both sides: rights costs rise at renewal (Sportradar's sport rights expenses grew from €214.2 million in 2023 to €404.3 million in 2025, overtaking personnel as its largest cost line), and suppliers must pass the increase on to operators, who may push back or, as Genius Sports warns, seek data through unofficial channels instead of signing an official data deal.
Payments, KYC and compliance vendors
Payment providers earn per-transaction fees and a percentage of value, with pricing that reflects the higher chargeback and regulatory risk of gambling and a payment mix shaped by regulation: Great Britain, for example, banned gambling on credit cards from 14 April 2020. KYC and identity vendors charge per check, with volume tiers; AML monitoring and geolocation are licensed per operator. These are thin-margin, high-volume businesses whose value to the operator is coverage (the payment method the customer uses, the identity source the regulator accepts) and reliability.
Affiliates
Affiliates own audiences: comparison sites that rank on search, content sites, tipsters, streamers, newsletters. They send players to operators and are paid per acquisition (CPA), as a share of the revenue the player generates, or a hybrid of the two. Their costs are content, search optimisation and media; their asset is search rankings, which a search engine's update can remove overnight. The largest affiliates are listed companies, such as Better Collective on Nasdaq Stockholm and Nasdaq Copenhagen, whose earnings move with operator commissions, search algorithms and advertising regulation; in 2025 revenue share made up 47% of its revenue and CPA 24%. The group has grown by acquisition, buying the sports media group Playmaker Capital in February 2024 and the UK sports betting media brand AceOdds in May 2024, and search volatility is a major risk: Better Collective warns that changes to search engine algorithms and AI-driven search features may reduce the organic traffic on which its publishing business partly relies. Regulation treats affiliate marketing as the operator's own: in Britain licensees are responsible for the actions of third parties they contract with and must be able to terminate affiliates that breach an advertising code, so affiliates are contractually bound to the operator's compliance rules.
Testing houses and regulators as suppliers
Testing houses certify games, RNGs, platforms and live equipment per jurisdiction, for fees, and their certification is the ticket to every regulated market. A few groups hold most of the approvals: the Gambling Commission's list of approved test houses for Great Britain had 14 entries as of 2 March 2026, six of them GLI companies and two BMM. Regulators are not suppliers but they behave like a cost line: licence fees per market, per product, per key person, and the compliance organisation needed to satisfy them. In Britain, for example, an operator pays an annual fee for each licensed activity, banded by gross gambling yield, and key staff hold personal licences with their own fees.
Reading a supplier
To understand any B2B company in the chain, ask four questions. What share of its customers' revenue does it take, and in which layer? How concentrated are its customers (a studio with half its revenue from one operator is a different risk from one spread across two hundred)? For scale, in 2025 Evolution's five largest customers produced about 39% of its net revenues and Kambi's three largest produced 35% of its revenue. How many regulated markets is it certified in, and which ones is it missing? And what is its distribution power: do operators need it, or does it need operators? The answers place the company on the margin map from lesson one and explain its valuation, which the next lesson turns to.