RubyPlay and Splash Tech to scale iGaming’s most in-demand engagement products

“Just being a content studio is great, but if you can bolt engagement products onto your offering, you’re going to stand out from the crowd.”

For Splash Tech founder Adam Wilson, RubyPlay’s acquisition of his company is not simply the coming together of two complementary suppliers. It is an early indication of where the wider supplier market may be heading.

The deal adds Splash Tech’s Free-to-Play games and supplier-agnostic jackpot engine to RubyPlay’s existing portfolio of free spins, rewards, missions and tournaments. In doing so, it strengthens RubyPlay’s evolution from a content-led provider into a broader content and engagement tools company, giving operators a way to add engagement mechanics across existing and third-party portfolios without building those capabilities from scratch.

Wilson expects others to follow.

Building muscle memory through free2play

Jackpots and free2play may be very different propositions, but Wilson judges both against the same unromantic measure: whether they produce value for the operator.

For free2play, that process can begin before the customer has committed money. “It’s about building muscle memory, providing achievable incentives to players and gamification,” Wilson explains. By lowering the barrier to participation, a free2play game can provide an accessible first interaction with an operator, while repeated play builds familiarity and creates a reason to return.

The format, however, cannot simply be copied and pasted from one market to the next. “We’ve found that the more localised the offering, the better,” Wilson says. “We’re talking about building anything from sumo wrestling to Love Island, as well as the headline sports. Ice cage fighting has been a popular one in a certain market for us.”

It is an eclectic list, but that’s kind of the point. Relevance can mean a global sporting event in one market and a far more niche (see ice cage fighting) obsession in another. Splash Tech’s job is to find the experience that fits the audience, rather than expecting the audience to fit the product.

One jackpot across an entire portfolio

If free2play builds familiarity, Splash Tech’s jackpot engine is intended to provide a common thread across an operator’s offering, even when the games themselves come from dozens of competing studios.

“A jackpot engine is a rare product in that you can brand that engine and it will sit across all of your content,” Wilson says. “As an operator, you might have 50 different game suppliers. On every single game that you’re serving, you can show a branded jackpot.”

That is the gap Splash Tech solves: many operators already have strong game libraries, and some have proprietary content, but they lack a flexible jackpot layer that can sit across the full offering without requiring them to build and operate their own engine.

That supplier-agnostic design matters because operators do not organise their businesses around the interests of one studio. They assemble portfolios from multiple providers and need tools capable of working across the resulting patchwork. Splash Tech’s engine can also extend beyond slots to points of sale including sportsbook bet slips, lottery and bingo.

“Not making the product available across all game suppliers and all product verticals would be a massive missed opportunity,” Wilson explains. “Wherever you can have a player placing a bet, give them the opportunity to win on the jackpot engine because it is such a sticky product.”

A branded jackpot also gives operators a visible identity across content they did not create, turning third-party games into something closer to their own ecosystem.

“There’s this huge, proven revenue opportunity, but it’s also about continuity of the brand that exists across the whole platform and the whole offering,” Wilson adds.

No room for products gathering dust

Even the most flexible technology cannot do all the work itself. Wilson is blunt about what happens when an operator treats an integration as the end of the job.

“If I just give you one of our games or our jackpot engine and you just plug it in and leave it there to collect dust, you will come back and tell me in three months’ time it’s not working,” he says. “And I will say to you, ‘How have you invested in the product?’”

Splash Tech instead begins by asking what success means for that operator: more sign-ups, improved conversion, bet-slip monetisation, higher lifetime value, retention among a specific cohort or reactivation of churned players.

The objective is to create more relevant engagement moments across the player journey, from first interaction to repeat play, cross-sell and long-term retention.

“As much as we work as a managed service, it’s always a collaboration,” Wilson states. “We need to make sure that the operator and Splash are a partnership, we understand your requirements, and then we can go out and deliver that for you.”

That management also involves balancing margin and longevity. Wilson notes that Jackpot engines need to balance commercial performance with a sustainable and enjoyable player experience. Operators need enough control to manage contribution levels, drop mechanics and reward frequency, while ensuring the product remains engaging and fair for players over time.

 “How do you balance that against not draining too much of the players’ funds and making sure that it has the stickiness, and that we’re not pushing players away, but encouraging them to come back?” he asks. “That really is the science.”

For Splash Tech, optimisation means protecting a safe and enjoyable experience while giving operators the opportunity to increase gross gaming revenue. “Getting that balance right is why we exist, really,” Wilson says.

Proven impact, not a post-acquisition promise

These are not capabilities that Splash Tech intends to begin developing now the acquisition has completed. Its products are already live with recognised operators including ComeOn, while a number of its free2play relationships are entering their fifth year.

Commercial confidentiality prevents Wilson from attaching individual numbers to those partnerships, but he is unequivocal about the jackpot engine’s record. “Every operator or brand that’s launched our jackpot engine has seen an immediate lift in GGR,” he says.

That impact, he argues, comes from preparation as much as product. Splash Tech works with partners to establish expectations and benchmark performance against relevant KPIs before launch. On the free2play side, the picture is similarly collaborative rather than automatic.

“Wherever there is investment from the operator or the platform in properly investing in the infrastructure needed to maximise the output of the product, we have seen great returns, ROI, on that investment,” Wilson says.

In other words, there is no magic “engagement” button. There are tools, expertise and an operator willing to put both to work.

Business as usual… with rocket fuel

For existing Splash Tech partners, “different” is not supposed to mean disruption. Maintaining the company’s products, expertise and relationships was a central consideration during the transaction.

“For all of our customers, it’s been and will continue to be business as usual,” Wilson says.

The wider opportunity is to reduce some of the fragmentation operators face. Splash Tech’s jackpots and free2play products complement RubyPlay’s free spins, rewards, missions and tournaments, while remaining capable of supporting third-party content rather than being fenced inside a single studio’s games.

What changes is the support behind that business. Wilson says Splash Tech is moving from the resources of a 20-person company to those of a group of around 300, adding depth across licensing, compliance, finance, technology, product and business intelligence. In his characteristically understated phrasing, each area has had “rocket fuel injected into it”.

RubyPlay’s broader licensing footprint and distribution also give Splash Tech access to operators and markets it could not have pursued efficiently alone.

“Because you’re a small business, you need to pick your battles,” Wilson says. “I can’t go and get 10 licences this year. It’s just unrealistic. It would require so much work that it would distract us. Now we have that ability through our relationship with RubyPlay, and we are grabbing that opportunity with both hands.”

There is also a natural product opportunity. Splash Tech has traditionally been weighted towards sports within Free-to-Play, while RubyPlay brings a substantial casino ecosystem. For Wilson, the agreement creates a chance for Splash Tech to bring its distinctive engagement thinking into the RubyPlay world, planting a seed for future products that combine Splash Tech’s Free-to-Play and jackpot expertise with RubyPlay’s content ecosystem, market knowledge and distribution reach.

Beyond the content studio

For RubyPlay, Splash Tech supplies a way to move beyond games and towards a broader content-and-engagement proposition. For Splash Tech, RubyPlay supplies the reach to take already proven products further. And for operators, the value is practical: a flexible engagement layer that can sit across casino, sportsbook and third-party content, reduce operational complexity and create more reasons for players to keep coming back.