From Acquisition to Architecture

Extract from SBC Leaders Magazine 13.01.2025

Vyking CEO FRANZ GERHART on the shift from an acquisition arms race to a focus on the ROI from platform architecture

For the better part of the last decade, iGaming has been defined by an acquisition arms race. Bonuses, affiliates and media buys scaled faster than the underlying product ever did. Operators chased CPAs instead of sustainable margins. And in a world where capital was cheap and market access was expanding, that model worked — at least for a while.

But the industry has changed. Sustainable success will not come from spend alone. It will come from operators who pair smart investment with smarter product architecture.

While CRM, bonuses, and media spend absolutely still matter, and behavioural CRM remains one of the strongest retention levers we have, the real multiplier is the platform layer. Architecture is what turns those tools into outcomes.

You simply cannot create sustainable economics on top of a closed, dependency-heavy system. And you cannot innovate if your platform forces you to renegotiate every time you want to test a new idea. As operators face rising acquisition costs and pressure on margins, the question is no longer “How do we get more players?” It is “How do we create more value per player?”

And that answer starts with product control, real product control, at the architectural level.

“The acquisition era went to the operators who could shout the loudest. The era ahead will belong to those who build the smartest.”

CONTROL ISN’T ANOTHER TOGGLE. IT’S ARCHITECTURE

One of the industry’s biggest misconceptions is that “control” is just a collection of settings: more back-office options, more bonus templates and more configurable skins. But settings are not control, they are permission slips. True control is structural. It’s the ability to plug in your own tools, ship your own UX, decide your own roadmap, and react at the speed of your strategy — not by the speed of your vendor’s global prioritisation cycle.

This is where traditional platform models can struggle. They provide configuration, but not always the level of flexibility operators now expect. And because these systems must support many brands at once, even good ideas can end up waiting in a broader release schedule.

From my experience, this is the single biggest operational tax on ambitious operators today: the roadmap dependency that drains velocity, creativity, and ultimately, ROI. At Vyking, we believe architecture, not feature count, is what decides who wins.

OPERATORS ARE GROWING UP.

PLATFORMS NEED TO GROW WITH THEM

The iGaming market is split. There are operators who are comfortable being marketing-led turnkey brands. And then there are those who want to build long-term enterprise value by acting like product companies.

These ambitious operators are hiring product managers, bringing in engineers, building UX capabilities, and designing their own journeys. They want to own the experience that sits between the content and the customer. But they don’t want to build everything from scratch, and they don’t want to inherit the brittleness of legacy stacks.

That is exactly the gap Vyking exists to fill: the space between off-the-shelf and full in-house.

Our open architecture approach, which includes frontend source access, a modular backend, and reverse integration, gives operators control over the layers that actually drive differentiation while relying on a battle-tested core for compliance, wallet, and game integrations.

This is why our Core, Edge and Flex tiers matter. They reflect the natural evolution of a growing operator: start fast, scale smart, then own what makes you unique.

The only certainty in our sector is uncertainty. New regulations, new payment rails, new content formats, new channels. Closed systems buckle under this level of change. Every new requirement becomes a negotiation. Every market expansion becomes a project and every innovation becomes expensive.

Open architecture gives operators the freedom to plug in, swap, extend and test without friction. Want to trial a new KYC provider? Do it. Want to launch a new lobby design for one region only? Ship it. Want to integrate an AI segmentation layer? Bolt it on. You don’t need to predict the future. You just need a platform that won’t limit your response to it.

INTRODUCING VYKING PODS

And this is where architecture becomes more than philosophy — it becomes acceleration. At Vyking, we are not only rethinking how operators control their product, we are rethinking how the entire content layer should work. Imagine integrating casino content not through months of engineering effort, but by simply adding a JavaScript library to your website. That’s the future we’re building at Vyking.

Our new pod system, which we are developing, uses in-memory WebAssembly clusters running on the end user’s device — micro “pods” that handle the full communication cycle locally. The result is a cost-free, integration-less content protocol that removes the bottlenecks operators and studios have been fighting for years. No heavy middleware, no vendor backlogs, and no painful certification cycles. If you close a deal with a game studio today, you can be live with their content tomorrow.

For the industry, this represents speed, accessibility, and an entirely new way of thinking about platform infrastructure. And for operators, it unlocks an innovation curve that finally moves at the pace of ambition and not the limitations of legacy systems.

The brands who win the next decade won’t be the ones who spend the most. The acquisition era went to the operators who could shout the loudest. The era ahead will belong to those who build the smartest. That’s where margins are made, where retention is earned, and where ROI is created.

That’s where Vyking is focused — not as another platform vendor, but as the architectural foundation for operators who want to behave like product companies and build long-term enterprise value.