Every Supplier Has the Same Blackjack Table — ICONIC21's CCO Says the Real Race Is How Fast You Can Launch It

August 26, 2026

Live casino has stopped being a niche vertical and become a core product — which means the tables themselves no longer differentiate anyone. In a piece for iGaming Business, ICONIC21 chief commercial officer Alina Popa argues the competitive battleground has moved to the gap between signing a contract and going live, where a six-month studio build is now a liability rather than a standard.

Ask most operators what separates one live casino supplier from another and you will get an answer about content: the size of the portfolio, the game-show formats, the number of tables. Alina Popa, chief commercial officer at ICONIC21, thinks that answer stopped being true some time ago — and that the industry has been slow to notice.

Her argument, set out in a piece for iGaming Business, is simple enough to be uncomfortable. Everyone has blackjack. Everyone has roulette. A player looking at the felt could not reliably say which supplier built the table they are sitting at. When the product is effectively common property across the market, the product cannot be what wins the deal.

The divide that quietly disappeared

Not long ago the market split cleanly: live casino specialists on one side, sportsbook and slots brands on the other. That separation has largely dissolved. Live tables now sit at the centre of most casino strategies rather than off to one side, because they do something slots struggle to do — hold attention, create atmosphere and give a brand somewhere recognisable to put its name.

Player expectations moved with it. People arriving at a live table now expect interaction and presence, and they work out very quickly when a table offers neither. Popa cites a figure of 3.6 billion connected players engaging with interactive experiences worldwide as the backdrop — an industry-scale number worth treating as a directional claim rather than a precise one, but the direction is not really in dispute.

Two identical tables, two completely different products

The distinction Popa draws is between a table pulled off a shared feed and a table built for a specific brand on that brand's schedule. From the outside they can look the same and carry the same name. Commercially they are not remotely the same thing.

Her account of ICONIC21's own history is unusually candid on this point: the company shipped solid, classical games early on and found that a good product simply did not open the pipeline, because dozens of competitors could offer the same tables. What changed the trajectory was not a better release. It was rebuilding the commercial model around partnership and delivery speed.

Built for speed, or just claiming it

Popa is careful to separate speed from heroics. Delivering fast once, through a big push and a fortnight of panic, is not the same as being fast — and in her reading it is usually evidence that the underlying system was never designed for the pace being promised.

The structural version, she argues, looks like this: a deliberately lean team to avoid the organisational drag that slows larger providers; commercial and delivery functions redesigned to work alongside each other; explicit protocols, tracking and direct coordination between the client and the technical side so information does not evaporate in the handovers. The point is a process that is consistently quick, rather than a company capable of occasional bursts.

The internal change she describes as hardest was philosophical rather than procedural — shifting the whole company from thinking of itself as a delivery-focused supplier to thinking of itself as a consultative partner, and getting departments that never speak to a client to buy into that too.

Branding and speed are the same argument

The second shift running in parallel is branding. A dedicated, branded environment signals exclusivity and gives an operator a coherent identity that a shared table cannot manufacture — which is precisely why large operators drawing on the same underlying content increasingly lean on it to stand apart.

But Popa's framing ties the two together rather than treating them as separate goals. A branded studio, she argues, is only worth having if it can be delivered on the operator's timeline. Arrive late and the marketing moment it was built to capture has already passed — the studio launches into a campaign that is over. Speed gets a partner live; branding makes them recognisable; both depend on treating the relationship as continuous rather than as a transaction that ends at signature.

What this means if you're a supplier competing on catalogue

The uncomfortable conclusion is aimed squarely at providers whose pitch is still the portfolio. In a market that is consolidating at the top while newer entrants undercut on price, a strong catalogue buys a seat at the table and nothing more.

Popa's suggested reframe is to stop asking what the next great game will be and start asking what can be delivered that a competitor could not simply license as well. It is worth noting that this argument comes from a supplier whose competitive advantage happens to be exactly the one it identifies — vendor commentary usually describes the race in terms the vendor is winning. That does not make it wrong. Operators have been quietly frustrated by six-month studio timelines for years, and any supplier that can genuinely compress them is selling something a licensing deal cannot replicate.

This article summarises and responds to commentary published by ICONIC21 chief commercial officer Alina Popa via iGaming Business; figures and claims are hers unless otherwise noted. Gambling involves risk and isn't for everyone — please play responsibly, set your limits, and if it stops being fun, take a break.