Soft How to choose a game aggregator: 12 questions to ask before you sign
Sales decks all claim thousands of games and fast integration. These twelve questions cut through that. Each one comes with the answer you want to hear and the answer that should make you slow down.
Before the questions: know your own shape
The right aggregator for a crypto casino launching on Telegram is the wrong one for a fiat casino with a call-centre VIP team. Write three lines before you contact anyone:
- Your markets and currencies, in order of expected revenue.
- Your launch date and how many developers you actually have.
- The promotions you plan to run in the first six months.
Every answer you get should be measured against those three lines, not against a generic idea of “best”.
The 12 questions
1. Which studios are live for my markets and currencies today?
Ask for a spreadsheet, not a logo wall. You want studio, number of games, currencies supported and any market where the studio is switched off.
Good answer: a file within a day, filtered to your currencies. Slow down if: the reply is a homepage figure. SoftAggregator publishes 40,000+ games from 200+ providers, SOFTSWISS and EveryMatrix publish their own large totals. Those are useful for scale, not for your lobby. A Turkish lira casino cares whether its top ten studios accept TRY, not about the total.
2. Can I test before I sign?
Good answer: sandbox or live test keys this week. Some vendors give them at signup with free credit, which is how SoftAggregator works. Slow down if: testing is only possible after a signed contract and a setup invoice.
3. Which wallet models do you support, and what exactly happens on a timeout?
Most vendors offer a seamless wallet. Some also support a transfer wallet. The interesting part is failure handling. Ask your developer to read the rollback and retry section with you.
Good answer: a clear rule. For example, “debits time out after X seconds and we send a rollback with the same transaction ID; credits are retried until acknowledged.” Slow down if: nobody can explain what happens when your server does not answer. See our seamless vs transfer wallet guide for the details.
4. How fast is a game launch from my servers?
Have your developer time 20 launches across five studios from your hosting region. Launch speed depends on the aggregator’s servers, the studio’s servers and the route between them.
Good answer: numbers you measured yourself that you can live with. Slow down if: launches are fast for one studio and slow for others with no explanation.
5. What does the commercial model look like?
Common structures: a percentage of GGR per studio, a monthly minimum, a setup fee, or a prepaid credit balance. Ask whether there is a setup fee and a monthly fee, and get the per-studio terms in writing.
Good answer: a document with every studio’s terms and a clear statement of fixed fees, including “none” where that applies. SoftAggregator, for instance, has no setup fee and no monthly fee, and runs on prepaid credit topped up in USDT or USDC. Slow down if: some studios are “priced separately” with no figures until after signing.
6. How do I pay, and what happens if I fall behind?
On a postpaid model you get an invoice and payment terms. On a prepaid model your credit runs down as players lose, and games stop when it hits zero.
Good answer: a clear warning threshold, an alert before games stop, and a fast top-up route. Slow down if: nobody can tell you the order of events when credit runs out. With a prepaid vendor, set your own internal alert well above zero.
7. Which player currencies can I use, and is it per player?
Ask whether one player account can play in a currency different from another player on the same casino. Ask how crypto is shown: as a coin amount, or converted to a fiat display.
Good answer: per-player currency, a list that covers your markets, and a plain statement of which studios accept which currencies. Slow down if: you are told “we convert everything to EUR” without detail on rates and rounding.
8. What promotional tools come through the API?
Free rounds, tournaments, jackpots, prize drops. Ask what you can trigger from your own back office through the aggregator, and what only exists inside a studio’s own tools.
Good answer: a list per studio of what works. Slow down if: a demo shows tournaments but the API documentation has no endpoint for them. Be clear-eyed here: several smaller vendors do not offer a free rounds API at all. SoftAggregator says plainly that free rounds and built-in tournament or jackpot tools are not available yet. That is fine if your welcome offer is a deposit match. It is a problem if it is “100 free spins”.
9. What can I see in reporting?
Good answer: round-level export, per-studio GGR, filtering by player and date, and an API for pulling the same data into your own tools. Slow down if: reports are monthly PDFs.
10. Who answers when something breaks on a Saturday night?
Ask for the support channel, the hours and the languages. Telegram has become normal in this industry because it is fast. Email is fine for non-urgent issues.
Good answer: a named channel, a response target, and someone who can read your logs. Slow down if: support is a ticket form with no time commitment.
11. How do you announce changes and outages?
Good answer: a status page or an announcement channel, advance notice for API changes, and a versioned API that keeps old versions running for a while. Slow down if: you learn about breaking changes from your players.
12. What does leaving look like?
Nobody likes this question in a first meeting, which is why you ask it. You want to know the notice period, how unfinished rounds and pending balances are settled, and whether you can export your full history.
Good answer: a notice period in the contract and a full data export on request. Slow down if: the answer is “why would you leave?”
How to score the answers
Give each question a weight from 1 to 3 based on your three lines from the start. A crypto casino launching next month should weight questions 2, 5, 6 and 7 heavily and might weight question 8 low. A fiat casino built around free spin promotions should do the opposite. Then score each vendor 0 to 2 per question. It is crude, but it forces the conversation away from logos and toward your needs.
Typical trade-offs you will hit
Speed vs depth. Self-service vendors get you live fast but carry fewer marketing tools. Enterprise vendors carry the tools but onboarding takes longer and usually involves a sales process. Neither is wrong. Pick the one that matches your launch date.
Breadth vs control. A huge catalogue can make lobby curation harder. You will spend time hiding studios your market ignores.
Prepaid vs postpaid. Prepaid credit avoids invoices and disputes but ties up working capital and needs monitoring. Postpaid is easier on cash flow but brings credit checks and payment terms.
One vendor vs two. Two aggregators give redundancy and more studios. They also double the integration work and the reconciliation.
A two-week plan
- Days 1 to 3: shortlist three vendors. Read their API documentation before any call.
- Days 4 to 6: send all twelve questions in writing to each.
- Days 7 to 10: your developer connects to the sandbox of the top two, launches games and tests a forced timeout on the wallet.
- Days 11 to 14: compare written terms, score, decide.
If a vendor cannot fit into that window, ask yourself whether its support will fit into your Saturday nights. For background on how these vendors work, start with what a casino game aggregator is.
Frequently asked questions
How long should the selection process take?
For a startup, two to four weeks is reasonable: one week to shortlist and read documentation, one or two to run a sandbox test and compare terms, a few days to sign. Longer usually means you are waiting on a vendor's sales cycle, which tells you something about how support will feel later.
Should I ask for a sandbox before signing?
Yes, always. Self-service vendors such as SoftAggregator give API keys and test credit at signup, so you can test before talking money. Enterprise vendors may require an NDA first. Either way, never commit until your developer has launched a real game against your own wallet.
Is the biggest game count the best choice?
Rarely on its own. Players in one market concentrate on a few dozen studios. A catalogue of 40,000 games helps only if the studios your players want are live in your currencies. Ask for the list by market.
Can I switch aggregator later?
Yes, but it is a real project. Game IDs change, so favourites, lobby layouts and player history links break. Players with unfinished rounds need handling. Plan for it by keeping your own internal game ID that maps to the vendor's ID.
Which question do operators forget most often?
Question 8, about free rounds and promotional tools. Teams test launches and wallets, sign, and only then discover that their welcome offer depends on a free spin API the vendor does not have.