Stake-owner Easygo has spun out its internal games studios into one ambitious B2B project and Brais Pena explained to NEXT.io why exclusivity is no longer as necessary to Stake’s success as it once was.
Pena is the founder and CEO of Juice, but he has seen the long-term development of Stake’s parent company Easygo from the inside, having previously served there as CSO and COO.
The decision to work with Stake’s crypto-casino competitors like Roobet highlights a level of calculated risk in Easygo’s decision to spin out, because giving up the exclusivity of Stake’s games is clearly not without downsides.
But timing is everything, and Pena told NEXT.io that while the exclusivity of Stake’s games was a priority for Easygo in the past, the brand is established enough now to warrant this move into the B2B space.
When Pena had conversations to this end a few years ago, he said: “Stake didn’t have enough of its own exclusive content. Now it has enough, so we can afford to spin out Juice.”
In fact, the new Juice boss admits the demand has been sufficient to make the spin out worthwhile for some time, saying: “The ideal moment was maybe a year or two ago, but these things take time, to spin out a studio from a big corporation. I thought it was going to be simpler than it was.”
Launching aggressively
Perhaps making up for lost time is one of the strategic forces fuelling the aggressive launch strategy being pursued by Juice.
Roobet is Juice’s big launch customer, but without giving away too much, Pena lets on that he’s had contact from across European markets, Canada and throughout Latam.
He said: “In a few weeks, you will start seeing news about us popping up new clients.”
Some of these integrations will be trickier than others for Juice to pull off – Stake is maybe the biggest and most successful crypto casino to operate in multiple markets, some of which are grey.
In line with that positioning, Juice will initially be dealing with a lot of US sweeps and dot com brands, and Pena is clear that “we want to be top five in dot com and sweeps pretty quick, within the year.”
But beyond that, the company is also “starting the certification for eight different regulated markets.”
This will be a longer and more involved process, but Juice already has companies in those regulated jurisdictions that are committed to partnering, and Pena hopes these deals can be completed this year.
How far can Juice climb?
And where could that take Juice? Already the company has proclaimed its ambition to become one of the world’s leading game providers.
Launching with the games and development expertise that fuelled Stake’s own success means that it doesn’t need to build towards that ambition from the ground up, but there are massive incumbents in the space that will be hard to overhaul.
Pena got a little more granular on the feasibility of his own ambitions, saying: “I think reaching between five and ten is doable, but then to break the top five is really complicated because those guys are pretty big already.”
Volume and making a noise
Juice’s launch is not just aggressive commercially, but in terms of product too, and the CEO philosophised on what is necessary to reach the level of a Pragmatic Play or similar super-scale competitor.
Scarcity of product can create additional value, and indeed with the advent of AI, volume is not necessarily a differentiating advantage.
But Pena compares the product pipeline to Netflix, and argues for the existence of a form of natural selection in a high-volume release model.
For instance, the titles that are hits, be they games on an iGaming platform or TV dramas on a streaming site, will always be searched for if they are good enough, while the flops are buried.
And for a B2B provider like Juice, they will be competing against the titles of rival studios in the catalogue of any individual operator’s games.
They must therefore trust that their hits will still be searched and played, while making sure they keep adding their own efforts to the top of the pile of fresh releases.
“You need to get into the room. And that’s the point, right?”
Protecting your brand
Getting into the room and making a noise is clearly the idea at Juice, and while the team is stacked with product experience, adding the commercial expertise to drive partnership and marketing has been one of the first hurdles to overcome.
Pena has an approach here as well, and tells NEXT.io about a blog he wrote some five years ago that defines the philosophy well.
In it, he wrote of his surprise that so many games studios fail to market themselves directly, instead agreeing to branding products with the names of their client operators.
He compared the situation to Coca-Cola, for which any buyer will have to go through a third-party shop – but this doesn’t stop Coca-Cola advertising itself.
Creating a distinct brand as a supplier also grants the studio greater durability to rapidly evolving market conditions, and agility is something that newcomers will often have as an advantage over the larger incumbent competitors in any space.
Add that agility to the reported $12bn in player turnover that the previously exclusive titles already generated on Stake, and it would be an understatement to say Pena could be about to oversee a winning formula in crypto casino.
Dingnews.com 25/09/2026