Live Casino Is Stuck in Its Own Formula — And the Industry Is Starting to Admit It

Open any online casino today and navigate to the live tables. You know exactly what you’re going to see. A presenter in front of a sleek studio backdrop. Standard blackjack, roulette, baccarat. Maybe a game show wheel if the operator is feeling adventurous. The camera angles are crisp, the dealer is professional, and the whole thing looks almost indistinguishable from what it looked like five years ago. That’s the problem. Live casino — the vertical that was supposed to drag online gambling into a new era of authenticity and immersion — has quietly stopped evolving.

The industry knows it. And now some of the people who helped build it are saying so out loud.

The Same Table, the Same Setup, the Same Everything

Walk through a live casino lobby and the formulaic nature becomes impossible to ignore. The games are largely the same across every operator. The aesthetics — polished studio lighting, slick presenter outfits, branded card shoes — follow a template that Evolution established and everyone else followed. The mechanics haven’t fundamentally changed since live blackjack graduated from a novelty to a mainstream product. Even the “game show” formats that were supposed to represent bold innovation have calcified into their own predictable category: big wheel, multiplier, presenter doing their best TV-host impression.

The problem is not that any individual game is bad. It’s that the entire vertical has converged on a single aesthetic and a single operating model. Every new title feels like a variation on what already exists rather than a genuine departure. The creativity that players might reasonably expect from a product category that sits at the intersection of technology, entertainment, and live performance has been largely engineered out of the equation.

When Commercial Success Becomes a Ceiling

Here is the uncomfortable logic at the heart of this stagnation: live casino is enormously profitable, and enormous profitability is the enemy of risk. When something works this well — when operators can generate consistent, high-margin revenue from a format that players clearly enjoy — the commercial case for disrupting it becomes very hard to make internally. Why spend the money, take the risk, and absorb the development time when the existing formula keeps delivering?

The result is an industry that has optimised itself into a corner. The major suppliers have become extraordinarily good at executing within a defined playbook. They’ve refined streaming quality, improved latency, and added surface-level features around the core games. But the core games themselves, and the fundamental model of a human presenter dealing cards in a branded studio, remain essentially unchanged. Innovation has happened around the edges while the centre has stayed still.

Suppliers with the most market share have the least incentive to cannibalise their own products. Smaller studios can see the gap but often lack the distribution to make a real dent. And so the vertical drifts, commercially successful and creatively stagnant at the same time.

What Avanti Studios Is Arguing

Into this context comes a pointed critique from Jonas Delin, co-founder of Avanti Studios. Delin, who previously founded Authentic Gaming — the live dealer arm eventually acquired by Genting — has been direct about what he sees as a structural failure in the live casino supply chain. His position, articulated in coverage surrounding Avanti’s launch and its recent entry into the Spanish market, is that traditional live casino has been slow to embrace innovation, and that the operational model itself is part of the problem.

Avanti’s argument is that the physical studio setup — the staffing, the infrastructure, the shift patterns, the maintenance costs — creates a kind of creative drag that makes iteration expensive and slow. When it costs a significant amount to stand up a new table, operators and suppliers are less willing to experiment. You build what you know will work rather than what might push things forward. Delin’s framing is that putting technology at the centre, rather than physical studio operations, eliminates the bottlenecks that have held innovation back.

Avanti’s approach uses motion capture, 3D animation, and AI to create digital dealer clones — genuinely real-time multiplayer gameplay, but without the fixed costs of a traditional studio. The goal is not to replace the feel of live casino but to decouple it from the operational constraints that have made the product so resistant to change. Gustaf Hagman, Avanti’s other co-founder and the former CEO of LeoVegas, frames this around player trust: the format must remain authentic and live, but the machinery behind it doesn’t have to look like it did in 2015.

What Genuinely Fresh Live Casino Could Look Like

The honest answer is that no one fully knows yet — which is itself part of the problem. The category has been so commercially dominant for so long that the industry hasn’t had to seriously answer the question. But if you take the structural critique at face value, there are a few directions that would represent real departures rather than incremental updates.

One is deep personalisation at the table level. The idea that every player sees the same dealer, the same backdrop, and the same pace of play is a consequence of the physical studio model. If that constraint is removed, you could imagine tables that adapt to individual preferences in real time — different visual environments, different dealing styles, different audio atmospheres. Not in a way that changes the game, but in a way that makes the experience feel less like a broadcast you’re watching and more like a session you’re having.

Another is genuine format experimentation. The game show format felt fresh when it arrived, but the execution has settled into the same groove as everything else. What hasn’t been properly explored is live casino that borrows from interactive entertainment formats — games with narrative arcs, sessions where the stakes and atmosphere shift based on what’s happening at the table, experiences where the social layer is more than a chat window. There’s a lot of space between “dealer deals cards” and “genuinely compelling live entertainment” that the industry has barely touched.

What This Means If You Play Live Tables

For players, the stagnation of live casino is both a frustration and an opportunity. The frustration is obvious — if you play regularly, the product can start to feel repetitive in a way that RNG slots, for all their flaws, typically don’t. The sameness is noticeable once you start looking for it.

The opportunity is that genuine challengers are starting to emerge and name the problem directly. When founders with the pedigree of Hagman and Delin launch a company explicitly built around the argument that traditional live casino has been slow to innovate, it signals that the category is entering a more contested period. Competition tends to produce the creativity that dominance suppresses. Operators who want to differentiate will eventually have to back products that do something different rather than just something familiar in slightly higher definition.

Worth paying attention to: suppliers who are actually trying new things with format, environment, or player interaction — not just incremental production upgrades. The next few years should reveal whether the stagnation was a permanent condition or just a very long plateau before something genuinely interesting happens to live casino.