Every slot you have ever spun was built by a studio, not by the casino. The casino rents the games, puts them in a lobby and handles your money. The rules of the game itself, the maths, the bonus round and the maximum win, all come from the provider.
We track more than 200 of those studios, from giants like Pragmatic Play and Evolution to small teams with a handful of releases. Search all of them below, see how many open casinos in our database carry each one, and jump straight to the guide for the studio you care about.
Reviewed byFred AndersonWhat is a casino game provider?
A game provider is the studio that designs, builds and certifies the slots and table games a casino offers. The provider sets the RTP, volatility, features and maximum win, then licenses the game to many casinos at once. That is why the same title plays the same way wherever you find it, unless the casino picked a lower RTP version. Use the index on this page to find a studio and the casinos that carry it.
The number on each card is how many open casinos in our database list that studio in their lobby. Closed and blacklisted casinos are left out of the count. Cards marked Studio guide are studios we have written about that no open casino in our database lists right now.
Sort by casino count to see who is everywhere, or switch to A to Z if you already know the name. The search box filters as you type.
No studio matches that search.
A lot of complaints about a “tight” casino are really about a game. The reels do not know which site you are playing at. Load Gates of Olympus at two different casinos and the same code from Pragmatic Play is running in both, and in a properly licensed setup the casino has no way to touch the result of a single spin.
Where the casino does get a say is everything around the game. The split looks like this:
| Set by the studio | Set by the casino |
|---|---|
| The RTP versions a game is released in | Which of those RTP versions goes live in its lobby |
| Volatility, features, bonus rounds and the maximum win | Bonus terms, wagering and which games count towards them |
| Game rules and the random number generator | Payment methods, withdrawal speed and customer support |
So if a bonus round feels stingy, look at the studio and the RTP version. If your withdrawal is slow, that one is on the casino, every time.
“Game provider” covers three quite different businesses, and it helps to know which one you are dealing with before you judge a studio.
Most names in the index build slots. They work like small game companies: a maths team designs the paytable and the volatility, artists and sound designers build the theme, and a release goes out to hundreds of casinos on the same day. Some ship a new title almost every week, others two or three a year, and you can usually feel the difference in polish.
Live casino is a physical operation. Evolution, Pragmatic Play Live and Playtech run real studios with real dealers, cameras and tables, and stream them straight into the casino lobby. The result of a roulette spin comes from the wheel, not from a random number generator, which is why plenty of players who distrust slots are perfectly happy at a live table. Evolution also made the game show format popular with titles like Crazy Time and Lightning Roulette.
The newest corner of the lobby. Spribe’s Aviator, released in 2019, turned the crash format into a staple: a multiplier climbs until it stops, and you either cash out before it does or lose the stake. Rounds take seconds, so the speed is part of the appeal and also the best reason to set a limit before you start.
This is the one thing I wish more players knew. Many studios ship the same game in several RTP versions and let each casino pick one. Book of Dead from Play’n GO is the classic example. The version most people quote pays back 96.21%, but the game also exists at 94.25%, 91.25%, 87.25% and roughly 84.2%. Same graphics, same free spins, same expanding symbol. Over a long session the lower versions simply hand back less of what you put in.
Nothing on the lobby tile tells you which one you are getting. You have to look inside the game:
It takes thirty seconds, and it is the only part of a slot’s maths you actually get to choose.
Play enough slots and you start to recognise a studio before the logo has finished loading. Nolimit City builds brutal, high volatility games around its own mechanics like xWays and xNudge, where long dry spells are the price of a shot at an enormous multiplier. Hacksaw Gaming leans the same way, with stripped back visuals and big max wins. NetEnt’s Starburst sits at the other end of the scale: low volatility, small wins that land often.
None of this is hidden. Most studios list the volatility, as a scale or a row of lightning bolts, and the maximum win as a multiple of your stake in the game info. Two slots with the same RTP can feel completely different, because RTP tells you how much comes back over millions of spins and volatility tells you how unevenly it arrives.
So match the studio to the session. With EUR 50 and a whole evening ahead, a high volatility game can be gone after a few minutes of bad luck. If you are chasing one big hit and accept the odds, that is exactly what those games are built for.
A studio rarely ships one version of a game to the whole world. Regulators set their own rules on speed, stakes and features, and providers build market versions to match. That is why a slot you know from one country can feel slower, or look slightly different, somewhere else.
Germany is the clearest example. A slot at a German licensed casino comes with:
The UK has its own set, including bans on autoplay and on features that speed up play. When a studio says a game is ready for regulated markets, this is the work behind that sentence.
Studios do not get to mark their own homework, at least not in regulated markets.
Before a game can be offered under licences such as the UK Gambling Commission or the Malta Gaming Authority, an accredited test lab checks the random number generator and confirms that the game pays what the studio says it pays. GLI, BMM Testlabs, iTech Labs and eCOGRA are among the names you will see on those certificates.
Serious providers hold supplier licences of their own, separate from the casinos they supply, and they list them openly on their websites. A studio that names no regulator anywhere is telling you something.
A lab confirms that the maths matches the paperwork. It does not judge whether a high volatility slot suits your budget, and it says nothing about the casino that offers the game. Fair maths at an unlicensed casino is still a risk with your money.
The name on the loading screen is not always the whole story, because the industry has consolidated hard. Evolution, best known for live dealer tables, bought NetEnt in a deal that closed at the end of 2020, and with it Red Tiger, which NetEnt had acquired the year before. Evolution then added Big Time Gaming, the studio behind the Megaways mechanic, in 2021 and Nolimit City in 2022. Those brands still release under their own names and keep their own style, but they sit under one roof.
Then there are aggregators. A casino rarely signs a separate contract with every studio in its lobby. It plugs into a platform that delivers hundreds of providers through one integration instead. Some studios run that side of the business as well: Relax Gaming, for example, distributes games from partner studios through its Silver Bullet programme.
Why should you care as a player? It explains how a brand new casino can open with thousands of games on day one, and why a small studio’s latest release can turn up on dozens of sites in the same week. It also means a studio’s reputation travels with its games, wherever you happen to meet them.
When a slot shows a seven figure jackpot ticking upwards, that money is not coming from the casino you are playing at. Network progressives are run by the studio. A small slice of every qualifying bet, at every casino carrying the game, goes into one shared pot, and that is how the totals get so large.
Mega Moolah is the famous one. It started under Microgaming, is now distributed by Games Global, and has paid some of the biggest online slot jackpots on record. Red Tiger went another way with its Daily Drop jackpots, which have to drop before a set time every day, and in 2019 it added hourly ones as well.
A local jackpot is funded only by players at one casino, so it grows slowly. A network jackpot pools many casinos and grows fast, but is rarely won. A must drop jackpot trades size for certainty and pays out before its deadline whatever happens. If jackpots are the reason you play, check which kind you are looking at in the game info, because the three behave very differently.
Every card in the index opens our guide to that studio, with the casinos in our database that carry its games listed on the page. Only open casinos are shown there.
Plenty of players choose a casino because Hacksaw or Nolimit City is in the lobby. Fair enough, a studio is a good reason to look. It is not a reason to sign up on its own, though. Before you deposit, check two things that have nothing to do with the games: that the casino holds a licence that is valid where you live, and which RTP version it runs of the titles you came for. The best catalogue in the world is no use if a withdrawal never arrives.
It designs and builds the games, gets them certified by a test lab, and licenses them to casinos. The provider also hosts and updates the games, so when you spin a slot the result usually comes from the studio’s own servers rather than from the casino.
Not freely. A casino can only choose between the RTP versions the studio has released and had certified. That still matters, because the gap between the top and bottom version of the same slot can be several percentage points. Check the info screen inside the game to see which one you are playing.
In our database it is Pragmatic Play, which appears in the lobby of more open casinos than any other studio. Sort the index on this page by casino count to see the current order, since it shifts as casinos open and close.
Size is not the test. A game from a small studio goes through the same lab certification as one from a giant when it is offered in a regulated market. What matters more is that the casino offering it is licensed for where you live.
Studios need approval for each regulated market they enter, and not every studio is certified everywhere. Casinos also switch off games that are not cleared for your country, so the same lobby can look different depending on where you log in from.
Indirectly. Free spins are almost always tied to specific slots, and the casino decides which games count towards wagering. Many casinos exclude certain titles from bonus play, often high RTP or high volatility games, so read the list of excluded games before you play with bonus money.
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