Why Aviator Is Still The Game Every Crash Title Gets Measured Against

SPRIBE’s Chief Commercial Officer Giorgi Tsutskiridze tells Comparasino how Aviator became the benchmark crash game and what it takes to hold that position in a market full of imitations.

Open an online casino lobby almost anywhere in the UK (even the world) today and you’ll find a crash section, often ten or fifteen titles deep. That row did not exist when we launched Aviator in 2019. 

Most of the games in it share the same skeleton – a multiplier that climbs until it doesn’t and a button you have to press before it stops, and a fair few of them share considerably more than the skeleton. I get asked reasonably often whether that bothers us. 

Not really, because the imitation is a large part of what turned crash from a curiosity into a category that operators plan around. What it has changed is how much work goes into staying at the front of it.

The mechanic was never the hard part:

Any competent studio can build a rising multiplier and a cash-out button in a matter of weeks. The maths is no secret and the interface is simple enough to copy. What takes far longer to build is the room the game is played in. Aviator has a live bet feed, a chat, rain drops and tournaments running through it, and none of that works unless there are enough people in there to make it feel busy.

We have around 77 million monthly active players placing roughly 400,000 bets a minute, so the feed scrolls constantly and the chat keeps moving. Load a cloned version carrying a fraction of that traffic and the same features sit there looking fairly empty. Players pick up on the difference inside about 30 seconds, even if they couldn’t tell you exactly what they were picking up on.

The part that gets overlooked is how much of the appeal lies in the habits that have grown around the game, the regulars posting in the chat every evening and the players who cash out at the same multiplier every single round. We can build the features that make that behaviour possible, but nobody can ship it ready-made.

Placement is part of the product:

We work with more than 6,000 operator partners, and a good deal of the positioning work happens with them rather than inside the game. Plenty of providers hand over an API, invoice for the integration and move on to the next deal. We spend a lot of time arguing about lobby placement, building Aviator tournaments for individual markets and giving operators promotional tools through Broadway (our iGaming platform) so they have something to actually do with the game once it is live.

An operator running Aviator as a headline product with campaigns behind it sees very different numbers to one who parks it in row nine alongside 40 slots. That is a conversation we have almost daily, and it is a big reason the game keeps its profile in markets where the crash row is crowded.

Recognition that starts outside the casino:

Our partnerships with UFC, AC Milan and WWE do a job that is difficult to do from inside a lobby. A player who has already seen the Aviator brand at an event or on a shirt arrives at that crash row with a name they recognise, and recognition tends to decide which tile gets tapped when 15 of them look broadly alike.

Aviator is an official partner of the UFC.

Familiarity of that kind takes years and serious investment to build, which makes it the hardest part of our position for anyone to replicate quickly. It also hands our operator partners something to lean on in their own campaigns, and that counts for a lot in markets where several of them are chasing the same players with much the same content.

The bigger risk sits with us:

If Aviator were ever to lose the benchmark crash game position, my guess is that complacency will have more to do with it than anything a competitor releases. The Aviator people play today has been through a long run of changes since launch, and we are still shipping features and regional adjustments based on how players actually behave in different markets. 

Freezing the game at the point it took off would have been the easiest call available to us in 2021, and it would have handed the category to whoever kept iterating.

Aviator being the benchmark crash game and the reference point for a category is not something we get to own. The market grants it season by season and takes it away from anyone who starts coasting. We are conscious of that at SPRIBE, which is why the roadmap for a game that has been live for seven years still reads a lot like the roadmap for a new one.