Review Our affiliate team launched its own iGaming project in three months

[Hupuss]

About three months ago, our main affiliate network suddenly cut our revenue share by more than 20%

That was the last straw. We sat down, analyzed our tracker data, and realized that we were doing all the hard work - driving traffic with a high intent to purchase - yet getting only crumbs in return. We decided it was time to launch our own casino brand and direct traffic to it.

At first, we thought about writing our own software from scratch. Our technical specialist ran the numbers and essentially told us that it would take us more than 8 months just to get a buggy minimum viable product (MVP), and we’d spend our entire advertising budget on senior developers’ salaries before we’d see even a single player. So we started looking for platform providers like SoftSwiss, Nuxgame, and others. I can’t say which one we chose, since this post isn’t an advertisement.

Their API-focused platform allowed us to integrate our own cryptocurrency payment flow without huge setup fees or outrageous commissions on gross gaming revenue (GGR).

It took us about three months to launch. The first month was mainly spent resolving legal issues in Anjouan and establishing our corporate structure. We devoted the second month to integrating a gaming aggregator so we wouldn’t have to spend 100 years negotiating 100 separate contracts with providers. The third month was the toughest - setting up cryptocurrency flows, testing fraud prevention tools, and conducting tests without real bets.

Now we keep the entire margin for ourselves, but this is definitely not passive income. Payment service providers shut down without warning, fraudulent bots attack weekly, and player retention is a round-the-clock job. Nevertheless, if you truly control your traffic, owning the backend is much more profitable than begging for traffic from networks.

If anyone is thinking about launching their own iGaming brand feel free to ask questions; I have plenty to share.

 

[GaAirfield]

Congrats on making the shift to operating - getting a 20% cut on rev-share is usually the exact trigger that pushes teams to own their backend.

Launching in 3 months with Anjouan and an aggregator setup is a great timeline. Coding a custom PAM/RNG stack from scratch is definitely a money pit when modular turnkey setups like nuxgame or softswiss already handle the core S2S tracking and game feeds out of the box.

Out of curiosity, how are you handling those PSP drops? Are you routing failovers automatically inside your platform's backend, or did you have to build custom payment webhooks on top?

 

[MarkDon]

I’ve seen similar situation from the traffic side where a lot of effort went into bringing quality users, but the final numbers were always controlled by someone else. The frustrating part is that you can know your audience better than anyone, but still have almost no influence on the product, payments, or retention strategy. What surprised me after moving closer to the operator side was how much time goes into things nobody sees - payment issues, user verification, support, tracking errors, small UX changes that affect conversion. The revenue looks attractive from the outside, but the operational side is where most of the work happens. The three-month launch is a strong result. I’m curious how your first months compared to your expectations - was the biggest challenge getting new players, or keeping first ones active after registration?