Evolution Gaming: The Studio Behind Most Live Dealer Tables

Evolution, often still called Evolution Gaming, is the Swedish-listed company that builds and runs the live dealer studios behind a large share of online casinos’ roulette, blackjack, baccarat and game show tables. It does not take bets from players. It streams its tables to roughly 870 casino operators, according to its 2025 annual report, and those operators hold the player accounts. Of the twelve casinos we have reviewed that name outside game studios, eight list Evolution. This page sets out what we could check about the studio: who licenses it, the July 2026 UK settlement over its games turning up on unlicensed sites, where its revenue comes from, and what its one published return-to-player figure does and does not tell you.

A note on sourcing: evolution.com does not load from the network we research from, so Evolution’s own statements below come from archived copies of its pages, dated in the sources list. The UK Gambling Commission’s register and statements, and the annual report, were read directly on 20 October 2026.

The Company in Numbers

The parent company is Evolution AB (publ), registered in Sweden and quoted on Nasdaq Stockholm. Its brand page says it has been “pioneering online live casino experiences since 2006”. It also owns slot and RNG studios, including NetEnt, Red Tiger, Big Time Gaming and Nolimit City, plus a second live brand, Ezugi. On this page we stick mostly to the live side, because that is where the money is: the 2025 income statement shows €1,772.6 million of live revenue against €294.0 million from RNG games, so live tables brought in about 86% of the €2,066.5 million total.

A few figures from the same report give a sense of scale:

Measure (end of 2025)	Figure
Live tables operated	About 2,000
Studios	24
Operator customers	About 870
Employees	22,475
Share of staff working on tables as hosts and dealers	About 88%
Languages spoken by game presenters	24
Largest single customer’s share of net revenue	About 12%

That staff figure explains a lot about the product. Most of the 22,475 people Evolution employs are dealers and presenters working shifts at physical tables, around the clock, in front of cameras. What you see on screen is a real card shoe or a real wheel. The company says it monitors every table in real time from a Mission Control Room in each major studio, looking at “tables, games, volumes, and behaviour patterns” to catch fraud. That is the studio protecting itself and its operators. It is not a service to you, and it does not replace the casino’s own complaints process.

Where the Studios Are

The annual report names three production hubs: Riga in Latvia, where many new games are developed and tested; Fort Mrieħel in Malta, home to native-language tables for markets such as Denmark and Sweden; and Tbilisi in Georgia, the largest. Smaller studios in Lithuania, Romania, Czechia, Armenia, Spain and Bulgaria exist partly because some countries require the studio to be physically inside the market it serves. Outside Europe it lists studios in Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Canada, four US states and Cebu in the Philippines, which opened in 2025. It also runs Dual Play tables on the floors of land-based casinos in the UK, Malta, Romania and the US, where online players bet alongside people standing at the table.

Why should a player care? Because the studio you see shapes who is regulating that particular stream. A table in a New Jersey studio streams to New Jersey-licensed casinos under that state’s rules. A generic English-language table out of Riga or Tbilisi can be streamed to hundreds of operators in very different markets at once. For the basics of how a live game is run from shuffle to settled bet, our explainer on how live casino games work covers the mechanics. This page is about the company behind them.

Licences: Long List, Narrow Meaning

Evolution’s licences page, archived in July 2026, lists more than 40 approvals for the Evolution brand alone. They include a supplier licence from the Malta Gaming Authority, a gaming software licence from the Swedish Gambling Authority, supplier licences in Denmark and Belgium, two Spanish licences, Romanian studio and software licences, Gibraltar, the Isle of Man, Greece, Bulgaria, Latvia, Georgia, South Africa’s Western Cape and Tanzania. In North America it names the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Quebec, and regulators in Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia. It also lists a Curaçao gaming licence through Antillephone N.V.

The one we checked against a regulator’s own record is in Great Britain. The UK Gambling Commission’s register lists Evolution Malta Holding Limited, account 41655, with head office in St Julian’s, Malta, and two remote licence activities, Gambling Software and Game Host (Casino), both shown as active on 20 October 2026. Evolution’s website footer gives the Malta Gaming Authority licence for Evolution Gaming Malta Limited as MGA/CRP/187/2010/01. We did not check that number against the MGA register for this page, so treat it as the company’s statement.

What is missing from the list is just as useful. There is no Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, Vietnamese or Indonesian regulator on it. So when you meet an Evolution baccarat table at a casino aimed at Malaysia, the studio’s long licence list is not the licence that covers your account. The casino’s own licence is, and our guide on how to check a casino licence shows how to look that up on the register that issued it.

The July 2026 UK Settlement

This is the episode most coverage of Evolution leaves out, and it goes to the heart of how the studio’s games reach players.

According to the Gambling Commission’s public statement of 23 July 2026, the Commission found what looked like Evolution games on unlicensed websites in August 2024 and told Evolution in December 2024. Evolution confirmed that five of its genuine games were running on six websites operated by two companies that held no Commission licence, yet were “accessible at scale” to people in Great Britain. The Commission says it has information suggesting large volumes of visits from UK consumers between December 2023 and November 2024. Evolution then geo-blocked those games for British players on those sites and on others where they had appeared.

The Commission’s findings were about controls rather than the games themselves:

• Evolution’s anti-money-laundering risk assessment was “not appropriate” between April 2024 and January 2025, particularly on third-party risk, and was insufficient to show that two of its customers were supplying its games into Britain without a licence.
• Its policies on due diligence and ongoing monitoring of sub-licensees, including enhanced checks for high-risk ones, lacked detail.
• Its controls were not effective in making sure its games reached British players only through licensed operators.

The settlement had four parts: a payment in lieu of a financial penalty of £4,750,000, a new licence condition requiring an independent audit of the relevant policies and controls within 12 months, publication of the statement, and a contribution to the Commission’s costs. The Commission listed as mitigation that Evolution acted quickly on an action plan, co-operated fully and accepted the failings early.

For a player outside Britain, the lesson is about the supply chain. Evolution’s games can reach a casino through several layers of platforms and sub-licensees. Seeing a genuine Evolution table does not tell you that the site has a licence for your country, or that the studio vetted the operator in front of you.

Where Evolution’s Revenue Comes From

Note 4 of the 2025 annual report splits net revenue two ways, and the gap between them is the most revealing table in the document.

Region	By location of the operator (€m)	By location of the player (€m)
Europe	1,493.5	729.8
Asia	31.5	793.7
North America	285.9	296.7
South America	221.2	156.8
Other regions	34.3	89.6
Total	2,066.5	2,066.5

Measured by where players are, Asia was Evolution’s largest region in 2025, at €793.7 million, or about 38% of net revenue. Measured by where its customers are, Asia accounted for only €31.5 million. Read together, those two lines say that most of the money Evolution earns from players in Asia flows through operators based somewhere else. The report also states that revenue from regulated markets was €942.8 million, or 46% of the total. It does not define which markets count as regulated, but on its own figures the majority of Evolution’s 2025 revenue came from markets it does not put in that group.

The report is candid that Asia was difficult. The chief executive’s letter calls it “our most challenging region”, and the directors’ report says “cyber criminality continued to impact performance in Asia during 2025”. It does not say in that document exactly what form the crime took. For players in the region the practical takeaway is narrower: a stream that looks like an Evolution table is not proof of anything until you know who is running the casino around it.

The Games, and the One RTP Figure Published

Evolution’s brand page lists the expected classics, roulette, blackjack, baccarat, Dragon Tiger, Super Sic Bo, poker variants and craps, alongside the game shows it claims to have invented as a category: Crazy Time, Mega Ball, Dream Catcher, Lightning Roulette, MONOPOLY Live and Deal or No Deal. It also sells First Person titles, RNG versions of the live games with a “Go Live” button that takes the player into the hosted version.

What its game pages do not show, in the copies we read, is a return-to-player figure. The one exception we found from an Evolution company is the spec sheet DigiWheel, Evolution’s land-based brand, publishes for the casino-floor version of Lightning Roulette. It is worth reading closely, because it shows how these games are built.

• The published figure. “The optimal Return to Player (RTP) percentage is 97.30%”, with a footnote that the figure is “based on optimal strategy for Split, Street, Corner, Line and all Outside bets”.
• The trade-off. Straight-up bets pay 29:1 in Lightning Roulette, not the 35:1 of standard single-zero roulette. Evolution’s game page explains that between one and five Lucky Numbers are drawn each round and pay 50x to 500x on a straight-up bet. The lower base payout is what funds those multipliers.
• What is not published. The sheet gives no RTP for straight-up bets, which are exactly the bets the lightning feature is built around.

The 97.30% figure for outside bets matches what single-zero roulette has always returned, because those bets pay the standard odds. Whether straight-up bets end up higher or lower than that depends on the multiplier distribution, which the sheet does not publish. Look in the help screen of the live game at your casino, which is where the operator should show the figure for each bet.

Crazy Time shows a similar pattern on a larger scale. Evolution’s game page describes a money wheel with number bets of 1, 2, 5 and 10, four bonus games, and a Top Slot that can add a multiplier each round. It says the Pachinko bonus can grow to a maximum 10,000x multiplier and the Crazy Time bonus to 20,000x. Those are ceilings, not likely results. As with any multiplier game, the big numbers are paid for by the ordinary outcomes. The page gives no RTP.

If you mostly play the classic tables, the numbers that matter are in the rules, not the marketing. Our guide on how to play baccarat sets out the house edge on each baccarat bet. That table applies whichever studio deals the cards.

The Casinos We Reviewed That List It

The table further down this page is read from the same casino data files as our reviews, under both of the names the casinos use, “Evolution” and “Evolution Gaming”. At the time of writing it covers eight casinos: 1xBet, 96M, BK8, Dafabet, Maxim88, me88, PlayAmo and W88.

Their licences vary a great deal. Two hold Curaçao licences we found on the public register, two hold Anjouan licences we found on that register, and PlayAmo holds a Tobique Gaming Commission licence we checked. The rest state licences we could not fully confirm. Dafabet’s UK white-label licence covers its British site only. None of the eight is covered by Evolution’s licences, and the July 2026 settlement shows that Evolution’s own checks on where its games end up have had gaps. Whose tables a casino streams says little about the casino itself, which is why our live casinos comparison weighs each operator’s licence and payout record instead, and why the legal position where you live comes first.

Whatever the casino, the same checks apply before you sit down: confirm the casino’s own licence on its regulator’s register, open the help screen of the live game to see its payouts and return, and set a deposit and time limit before the first hand. Live tables deal fast and never close, which makes long sessions easy to drift into. Live dealer games are for adults aged 18 and over. If you are losing track of time or money, our responsible gambling resources list free, confidential help in each market we cover.