Image credit: Source: BETBY company announcement. Never imply stock depicts the actual event.
BETBY launched User Chat on 27 August 2026, a feature that lets bettors exchange messages, reactions, stickers and images with each other directly on a sportsbook's live event pages, the Malta-based sportsbook software supplier said. The tool sits inside the same page where markets, odds and the bet slip already run, so the conversation about a match happens in the same window as the bet on it.
It is BETBY's third engagement feature in five months, after Stories in April and Watch and Bet on 20 August, and the second launch inside a single week. Where Watch and Bet folded the bet slip into the video stream, User Chat folds the crowd into the same screen: threaded replies, pinned messages, automatic translation across languages, and moderation tools an operator can use to police the room.
Why BETBY built a chat room around a bet slip
BETBY frames the launch as demand it is hearing from operators, not from bettors: sportsbooks want a reason for a customer to stay on the page once a bet is placed, instead of tabbing over to a group chat, a Discord server or a streamer's live chat to talk about what just happened. Casino streamers on Kick and Twitch already own that conversation for free. BETBY's pitch is to bring it back inside the sportsbook, where an operator can moderate it, brand it and eventually monetise it. For bettors, the practical change is smaller than the pitch: a chat window next to the bet slip, on whichever operator switches it on first.
That pitch is unproven so far. BETBY has not named an operator running User Chat, disclosed a launch market, or published data on the kind of session-length lift it measured for Watch and Bet from World Cup traffic. The company's case for that earlier feature rested on hard numbers: gross gaming revenue per player up 44.79% at operators offering live streaming, drawn from BETBY's own platform data. User Chat ships with no equivalent evidence yet, only the argument that social features work.
A public chat room bolted onto real-money markets carries its own exposure: harassment, coordinated tipping, and a moderation workload that scales with every live event running at once, all while BETBY's own translation layer has to hold up across languages in real time. ESPN Bet's collapse already showed that an audience is not the same as a customer base; BETBY is now betting the reverse, that a customer base can be turned into an audience, one event page at a time. Whether operators want the added compliance overhead that comes with hosting a public forum next to a cash register is a separate question the announcement does not address.
Kirill Nekrasov, BETBY's head of innovation and R&D, said the feature follows behaviour already established elsewhere. "Sports have always been social, and users are already accustomed to watching, reacting and communicating simultaneously across streaming and entertainment platforms," he said. "User Chat brings that same behaviour into the sportsbook, giving players more reasons to stay engaged throughout an event while providing operators with another powerful tool to increase session duration, strengthen retention and build a more active community around their product."
Three launches, one thesis
Stories, Watch and Bet and User Chat all point the same direction: BETBY is betting that the sportsbook screen itself, not a separate app or a streamer's channel, should be where a bettor's attention lives for the length of an event. None of the three features carries a named operator or public performance data yet. The test is not whether BETBY can ship a chat box. It is whether an operator turns it on, keeps it moderated through a full weekend of fixtures, and can show a revenue lift resembling the one BETBY already claimed for streaming. Until one does, User Chat is a feature looking for its first case study.