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The biggest online gambling operators are building in-house game studios to own the content their players sit on, ending a decade in which the operator rented every slot and table game from a third-party supplier. DraftKings now ships exclusive titles such as Rocket, Dollar Up and Quakey Shakey across its own app and its Golden Nugget Online Gaming casino, and bet365 has built a proprietary Originals range. The shift looks small on any single game page, but it starts a structural change in who captures the margin on a bet.
The economics are the whole story. When an operator distributes a supplier's slot, it pays a content fee, typically a share of the game's gross gaming revenue, to the studio that built it. Own the game, and the fee stays in house. DraftKings chief financial officer Alan Ellingson called the operator's in-house iGaming studio a "differentiated advantage," in comments reported by EGR North America in May 2026. That is a margin claim as much as a product one: proprietary content converts a recurring cost into retained revenue on the highest-frequency product an operator sells.
What an in-house game studio actually changes
An in-house studio does three things a supplier deal cannot: it captures the content margin, locks exclusivity so a competitor cannot list the same hit, and lets the operator tune a game to its own player data rather than a supplier's whole-market averages.
DraftKings is the clearest US case. Its casino, and the Golden Nugget Online Gaming brand it acquired and migrated onto its own platform, both carry DraftKings exclusive games alongside the third-party catalogue. President Matt Kalish framed the Golden Nugget product around that mix of "hundreds of popular casino games, exclusive content" and DraftKings technology, in comments carried by Casino.org. The exclusive titles are the part a rival cannot copy; every other line item, a game aggregator can replicate in a week.
bet365 got there earlier and from a different direction, building out its Originals range over several years, confirmed in trade coverage that lists them alongside third-party hits. It did not stop signing supplier deals: it runs proprietary content and a full external catalogue side by side, using the Originals to differentiate and supplier volume to fill the shelf. That is the model most operators will copy, a proprietary layer on top rather than a wholesale replacement.
Why now, and not five years ago
Three conditions had to line up before building games in house made sense, and 2026 is the first year all three hold for the largest operators.
The first is scale. A game studio is a fixed cost: designers, mathematicians, engineers and a certification budget do not get cheaper because an operator is small. Spread that cost over a few thousand players and the economics are terrible; spread it over the multi-state, multi-million-player bases FanDuel, DraftKings and bet365 now run, and a single hit pays for the studio. Only a handful have crossed that threshold, which is why the trend sits at the top.
The second is platform ownership. An operator on someone else's technology stack cannot easily plug in proprietary content, tune it to its own data, or move it across markets. DraftKings built its sportsbook and casino on a unified in-house stack, which let it migrate Golden Nugget onto its own platform and serve exclusive games through both brands. Owning the pipes is the precondition for owning the content that flows through them, the logic we traced in why game content is becoming iGaming's real product moat: distribution is commoditised, so the defensible asset moves to the thing only you can list.
The third is margin pressure. Tax rises are compressing operator economics across the biggest markets, from the UK's Remote Gaming Duty jump to 40% to escalating US state betting taxes. When a government takes a bigger slice of gaming revenue, every remaining cost line gets scrutinised, and the content fee paid to suppliers is one of the largest and most controllable. Building in house is partly a defensive response to a tax environment that has made supplier margins a luxury.
The threat this poses to suppliers
Suppliers should read the operator studios as a real, if slow, structural threat. Evolution and Pragmatic Play still dominate the volume, and no operator studio is close to matching a top supplier's release cadence or live casino footprint, a race we covered in the Evolution versus Pragmatic Play live casino contest. The supplier moat in live dealer, built on physical studios, dealers and streaming infrastructure, is far deeper than in slots, and safe for now. The exposure is in slots and simple instant-win mechanics, where the barrier to building a competent game has fallen and crash-style titles have shown a mechanic, not a brand, drives play, as we flagged in how crash games became iGaming's fastest-growing category. The format is simple enough for an operator to build its own version and keep the margin.
The realistic outcome is not that operators stop buying supplier content, but that they stop paying full price for the commodity end of it. As operator studios absorb the low-complexity slots and instant-win games, suppliers get pushed toward the content where they still hold an edge: live casino, licensed-IP slots and ambitious releases.
The catch operators keep understating
Building games is not the same business as operating a betting platform, and operators talking up their studios rarely say how hard the content business is. A studio lives or dies on hit rate. Suppliers spread their risk across dozens of releases a year and a whole market's worth of operators, so a flop is absorbed and a hit is monetised everywhere. An operator studio has a narrower shot: fewer releases, one channel, its own players as the only audience. A run of mediocre games ties up expensive talent and underperforms the titles it was meant to replace. The margin case only works if the games are good, and game design is a different competency from running a sportsbook. That is why the smart operators, bet365 included, keep the supplier catalogue running underneath the Originals rather than betting the casino on their own studio.
There is also a portfolio-depth problem. Players want thousands of games, weekly novelty, and the specific supplier hits their friends are playing, and no in-house studio can supply that breadth. The proprietary layer captures margin on the games players use most, not a replacement for the catalogue; an operator that mistook one for the other would gut its own retention.
The proprietary layer widens
Expect the proprietary layer to widen into a standard part of how large operators compete. Every operator with the scale and owned platform to justify a studio will build or buy one, concentrate it on the slots and instant-win formats where margin capture is cleanest, and keep the supplier catalogue underneath for breadth. The content fee that once flowed automatically to suppliers becomes a negotiated, shrinking share.
Watch three markers into 2027: whether any operator studio produces a genuine cross-market hit, proof it can compete on quality and not just exclusivity; how suppliers respond, defending margin by moving into harder-to-copy content or defending volume by cutting fees; and whether mid-tier operators follow the majors, because a studio without scale is a fixed cost with no way to pay for itself. The operators building in-house studios now are trying to move the margin on every casino bet back onto their own side of the table.
Related on SparkNews: Why Game Content Is Becoming iGaming's Real Product Moat | Evolution vs Pragmatic Play: The Live Casino Race | How Crash Games Became iGaming's Fastest-Growing Category