There’s a claim that gets repeated at every industry conference, and the data has stopped supporting it. Live casino did outgrow slots across much of the early 2020s, but the latest global figures no longer support a universal claim that it’s still doing so. H2 Gambling Capital estimates reproduced in Evolution’s 2025 annual report put live casino’s five-year compound annual growth rate at 14.3%, compared with 23.6% for RNG casino. In Britain, slots gross gambling yield increased 10% year on year during the final quarter of 2025, reaching a record £788 million for that dataset. So much for the obvious story.
The earlier results explain why the industry keeps repeating it anyway. Evolution’s live revenue rose 28.1% in 2023 while its RNG business increased only 2.6%. The following year, Evolution’s live division grew 16.6%, while Playtech recorded 24% growth from live casino in regulated markets. Numbers like those made live look like the industry’s undisputed growth engine, particularly against mature slot portfolios struggling to produce anything comparable.
By 2025, however, Evolution’s live revenue had slipped from €1.776 billion to €1.773 billion, while RNG revenue increased from €287.4 million to €294 million. The category remains large and strategically important, but “live is growing faster than slots” has quietly become a market-dependent argument rather than an established fact. Which makes the actually interesting question a different one: why do operators and suppliers keep investing in it despite the slowdown?
Slots remain the largest part of online casino, accounting for an estimated 66% of global online casino revenue in 2025. Britain offers an even starker example: slots produced £4.2 billion of the country’s £5 billion in online casino gross gambling yield during the year ending March 2025. Live casino is expanding from a smaller base and still represents only around 29% of the global online market.
The issue is, a typical operator can offer thousands of slots through one or more game aggregators, and many competitors have access to broadly similar catalogues. Exclusive releases exist, but most games eventually sit in crowded lobbies beside hundreds of near-identical alternatives. Evolution itself describes the RNG supplier market as considerably more fragmented than live casino, with many studios competing for placement and player attention. When everyone has everything, nobody has anything special.
Live casino gives operators more ways to create inventory that cannot be copied immediately. Dedicated tables can carry an operator’s branding, employ dealers speaking a chosen language, and sit inside a customised studio environment. The underlying blackjack or roulette rules may be entirely ordinary, but the presentation belongs to one casino rather than appearing across every rival using the same aggregator.
And this distinction matters quite a lot, because online casino operators often compete using products supplied by the very same companies. A branded table, an exclusive game-show version, or a locally produced studio offers differentiation without requiring the operator to build the entire technical and production system internally. Live casino therefore functions as both gaming content and a piece of customer-facing brand infrastructure, which is a rather unusual combination for this industry.
Building a serious live casino operation requires far more than placing a camera above a roulette wheel, however tempting that mental image is. Suppliers recruit and train presenters, operate studios around the clock, stream low-latency video, supervise games, manage betting interfaces, and maintain the systems connecting each table to operator wallets. Evolution had about 870 operator customers and approximately 2,000 live tables at the end of 2025.
Operators outsource all that machinery because reproducing it independently would be expensive and very difficult to justify. One shared table can be distributed through many casino brands and serve large numbers of players at once, allowing the supplier to spread studio and labour costs across several customers. Larger operators can then pay additional fees for dedicated tables rather than financing their own production business from scratch.
Evolution earns most of its revenue through commission calculated as a percentage of the operator’s profit from its games, with dedicated-table, integration, and setup fees providing additional income. The arrangement gives suppliers direct exposure to betting volumes: when an operator’s live casino earns more, the supplier’s commission rises without another software licence ever needing to be sold. It’s a genuinely elegant model, if you’re the supplier.
The resulting margins can look more like those of a software company than a television production business, once the network reaches sufficient scale. Evolution generated €2.07 billion in net revenue during 2025 and remained highly profitable despite operating studios, physical equipment, and a workforce exceeding 22,000. Competitors entering the category face a much less attractive starting position, because they must build the capacity before they have enough customers to use it efficiently. The chicken-and-egg problem, with studios.
Traditional live casino relied on the familiar table games: baccarat, blackjack, roulette. Evolution’s launch of live game shows beginning in 2017 changed the commercial proposition by combining presenters and physical wheels with multipliers, bonus rounds, and RNG mechanics. Products such as Crazy Time and Lightning Roulette were never designed to merely reproduce a land-based casino online; they were built as digital entertainment formats that happened to be broadcast from a studio.
Game shows also lowered one of live casino’s historical limitations. Conventional table games can feel slow or intimidating to players accustomed to slots, particularly when they involve established rules or other participants watching the same table. Brightly presented wheel games require considerably less knowledge, and allow suppliers to target slot players without abandoning the live format.
The hybrid model creates more intellectual property than a standard roulette table, too. A supplier can own the visual identity, the bonus system, and the presentation format, then release local-language versions or adapt the concept for different operators. Successful games can remain visible for years, rather than being buried under the constant avalanche of new slots.
Newly regulated online casino markets frequently generate immediate demand for live content, because operators want a full product range at launch. Playtech’s 24% regulated-market live growth in 2024 and the continued expansion of supplier studios across North and Latin America reflect exactly that opportunity.
Though local requirements can also weaken the economics considerably. Suppliers may need country-specific or state-specific licences, certified systems, and domestic studios before they can serve a relatively small pool of operators. Unlike a slot that can be distributed remotely after certification, live casino may require physical facilities and employees within the market itself. Revenue must then grow enough to cover all those duplicated production costs, and there’s no guarantee it will.
Regulators are also paying closer attention to where live content actually appears. Suppliers distributing games through hundreds of operators and intermediaries must prevent licensed products from reaching prohibited markets, even when websites use VPNs, mirror domains, or other methods to dodge restrictions. Scale increases the revenue potential while making the distribution chain progressively harder to police. You can’t have one without the other.
Live casino’s reliance on actual human beings receives far less attention than its streaming technology, and it shouldn’t. Evolution reported that around 88% of its workforce worked at tables as hosts and dealers, while personnel expenses reached €476.8 million in 2025. The company also disclosed that 16,939 employees left during the year, equivalent to an 80% turnover rate, including 87% within operational roles. Read that number again: 80%.
These figures expose a genuinely uncomfortable part of the model. Suppliers can operate large studios in lower-cost labour markets and broadcast them into wealthier gambling jurisdictions, but the resulting margins depend partly on maintaining a constant supply of relatively inexpensive presenters. Evolution’s Tbilisi operation faced a prolonged strike in 2024 over wages, safety, and working conditions, including a hunger strike by several employees. Evolution disputed parts of the workers’ account and said its pay and benefits were competitive.
High turnover creates recruitment and training costs, while industrial action can reduce table capacity directly. Physical studios also introduce risks that slot suppliers largely get to avoid: workplace disputes, property costs, and service interruptions that affect several operators simultaneously.
Slots remain larger, easier to distribute, and, on the current five-year global estimates, faster-growing. Live casino nevertheless offers something the slot market increasingly lacks: controlled scarcity. A strong supplier can sell the same production infrastructure across many operators while charging extra for exclusivity, branding, and localisation.
The category’s next phase will probably be slower than the surge seen between 2020 and 2024. Evolution’s flat live revenue in 2025 already showed that studio expansion and new game releases do not guarantee continuous double-digit gains. Competition from Playtech, Pragmatic Play, and smaller suppliers keeps increasing, while regulation and labour costs are becoming steadily harder to ignore.
Live casino has not replaced slots, nor is it currently beating them in every credible growth comparison. Its business value comes from occupying a different position entirely: harder to build, easier to brand, and far more difficult for an operator to replace once dedicated tables and integrations are established. And that makes live casino more than just another content vertical, even when the numbers stop cooperating with the industry’s favourite growth story.
