Born to swipe: Casino games made for the TikTok Generation
Casino operators looking for the next generation of players face an unusual problem. Their prospective customers have grown up in a digital world built around simplicity, speed and instant gratification, yet much of the betting and gaming experience still speaks a very different language.
Sports betting can confront the newcomer with unfamiliar odds, markets and terminology, while the event itself may take minutes or hours to produce a result. Traditional casino games, meanwhile, can feel far removed from the endless stream of short-form, constantly changing content that dominates TikTok, Instagram Reels and other social platforms.
It was an encounter with that disconnect during the 2022 FIFA World Cup that ultimately set entrepreneur George Yashin on the path to founding Swipe Games.
Yashin had spent around 15 years building businesses across industries ranging from fashion technology and retail hardware to sneaker cleaning, as well as investing in early-stage technology companies. Yet when he attempted to place a football bet, he found the interface so impenetrable that he eventually headed to a betting shop to ask how to do it.
When he subsequently looked at casino games, something else struck him – the experience did not seem dramatically different from the slot machines he remembered seeing years earlier.
“I started thinking about how to combine the really great monetisation of randomness in casino games with the attention loop of social media platforms,” Yashin says. “The idea was: what if you could bet on the result of a short video or a short TikTok?”
Turning the feed into the game
That question eventually became Swipe Games, a Cyprus-based business that is well on the way to establishing swipe games as a casino category in its own right. Still in its commercial infancy, the company has rapidly gained traction across the industry since beginning sales late last year.
Instead of asking players to select individual titles from a conventional lobby, Swipe Games takes its cues from the social-media feed. Players enter an endless stream of short videos and have three to five seconds to choose between three possible outcomes. For example, in a football penalty shoot-out game that could mean a goal, miss or a save.
The ending of the video reveals the result. If the player does not fancy a particular clip, they simply swipe up to see another.
“We are as quick as crash games, but the pattern and the feel are more like betting”
The company currently has 10 games spanning themes such as football and cars, with content deliberately based around subjects already attracting attention on social media.
That familiarity is important. Swipe Games is not asking social-media users to learn an entirely new digital language when they arrive at a casino. Its proposition is that the behaviour they already perform almost instinctively – watch, decide, swipe, repeat – can become the gaming mechanic itself.
“The video itself is the game,” Yashin explains. “We are as quick as crash games, but the pattern and the feel are more like betting. We are combining two different worlds – betting and quick games.”
The rise of prediction markets reflects the same broader trend: consumers increasingly want a simple, intuitive way to take a position on what happens next. Swipe Games brings that behaviour into a casino format, turning short-form content into an instantly playable experience with outcomes revealed in seconds.
A category operators want to sell
If Swipe Games’ proposition is unfamiliar, Yashin says the speed of the industry’s response suggests it is not difficult to understand.
The company only began sales towards the end of 2025, but Yashin says it has subsequently signed around 30 to 40 contracts. Partners include BGaming, SoftSwiss, 1xBet, 01.tech, and Broadway.
Despite his experience launching businesses, Yashin has been surprised by the enthusiastic reception from the wider industry. Perhaps even more revealing is the feedback from the people tasked with selling the product. According to Yashin, one Swipe Games business development manager with more than 20 years’ industry experience told him he had never found a new product easier to pitch.
The response extends to potential customers. Yashin says that of around 50 leads generated through events and the company’s network, only one decided against integration, leaving Swipe Games prioritising a queue of prospective partners.
“We have a term within our team called ‘hot pie’,” Yashin says. “It is our internal term for a really hot product that is easy to sell. It is something new for the market and the market is ready.”
The numbers behind the swipe
The early player data is also giving Swipe Games confidence that it has created more than simply an eye-catching interface.
Yashin points particularly to comparisons with crash games, whose similarly short rounds make them a natural benchmark. A Swipe Games round lasts around eight to 10 seconds, but player behaviour can be markedly different.
Across markets in Latin America, Europe and Asia, Yashin says the average stakes for swipe games display a pattern closer to sports betting than crash gaming. In one market, the average Swipe Games bet was 20 times higher than the average crash-game bet with the same operator.
Retention has provided another encouraging signal. Depending on the market, Yashin says day-one, day-seven and day-30 retention can range from around the crash-game benchmark to between five and 10 times higher. The number of rounds played during a session can also be significantly greater.
The explanation, he believes, comes back to the behaviour that inspired Swipe Games in the first place. Crash players may experience a different outcome each time, but visually they repeatedly encounter much the same thing. Social media has conditioned its users to expect something new with every swipe.
“People are not playing it just as a quick crash game,” Yashin says. “They play it more like they are betting. It is a different pattern.”
An AI content factory
Creating that constant variety presents an obvious problem. A casino game requires random outcomes, but a library of pre-recorded videos eventually becomes predictable. Once a player recognises a clip, they could know how it ends.
Generative AI provided Swipe Games with its solution.
The company uses AI to generate its video content, combining models from technology providers around the world with the work of its own creators. Its library has already surpassed 20,000 videos, giving it the content engine required to keep refreshing the feed and respond rapidly to emerging social trends. That is important because Swipe Games plans to release new games or content every two weeks.
“People always need something new. I think the next wave is games with more content inside”
But AI’s role goes much further. Swipe Games’ developers are each supported by multiple AI agents working around the clock on coding and other tasks.
“We have maybe seven people in the tech team, but it feels like we have 30 or 40 people in the team,” Yashin says.
The company also uses AI to accelerate operator integrations.
“With a direct integration, we have examples of partners integrating us in 24 hours,” he says. “Reverse integration is really hard for everybody, but in our case we can complete a reverse integration in a maximum of three weeks, including all the tests and going live.”
The next big category?
Swipe Games’ immediate ambition is substantial: its current “North Star”, Yashin says, is to reach €600m in bet volume per month.
Yet its longer-term vision stretches beyond simply adding more short videos to the casino floor. Ultimately, Yashin does not see Swipe as simply another category within the existing casino lobby. His ambition is for it to become a platform-level feature: alongside games, live casino and sports, players would find a dedicated Swipe button opening an endless feed personalised around their individual tastes.
“At that point, it is no longer just a collection of games,” Yashin says. “It becomes a new format for consuming casino entertainment, where every swipe brings a new piece of content and a new playable moment.”
Within iGaming itself, Yashin believes the implications of generative and real-time AI could ultimately extend into areas such as live casino, including AI-generated characters replacing physical presenters.
“I think the industry will adopt these technologies much more quickly than people might expect,” he says.
There will inevitably be imitators if swipe gaming establishes itself. Yashin welcomes that prospect, but believes any rivals would struggle to match the speed, creative output and trend-spotting capabilities that sit behind it.
“I think it would be good for us to have strong competitors,” he says. “Of course, you can copy the mechanic, you can copy the name and you can copy the theme of the video, but you cannot copy the creative itself.”
Every era of iGaming has been defined by a breakthrough format. Slots became the industry’s foundation. Live casino transformed realism. Crash games reshaped instant-play entertainment. Swipe Games believes the next defining category will not simply be another game – it will be a new way of playing.
“People always need something new,” Yashin says. “I think the next wave is games with more content inside, and we see swipe games as potentially being the next wave.”