Are Branded Slot Games Still Effective at Attracting New Players?

Also, the industry's largest content studio, Light & Wonder, just walked away from a 27-year Monopoly license for the same reason. Branded slots carry a perpetual licensing cost that proprietary games don't. Operators and developers are improving their margins by building in-house.

Branded Slots Come With Permanent Royalties

Branded slots aren't free to license, and the cost doesn't stop once the game launches. Studios like IGT, Light & Wonder, and Aristocrat pay the IP owner, often a TV studio, record label, or celebrity, an upfront fee, then an ongoing royalty for as long as the game stays live.

It’s estimated that slot developers are paying over $200 million a year in licensing fees. Madonna's fee with Aristocrat alone is reportedly worth more than $10 million. ^[1] To make matters worse, IP owners often push for ultra-long-term deals. For example, IGT renewed its deal with Sony Pictures Television, which will run from 2025 to 2034. ^[2]

Operators Have Turned Away From Licensing

If branded IP reliably outperformed on a cost-adjusted basis, the largest US operators would be expanding their use of it. However, all three of the largest US online casino brands are emphasizing the opposite in their own earnings disclosures.

DraftKings' iGaming segment grew revenue 18% and adjusted EBITDA 22% in Q1 2026, with the company crediting over 50 DraftKings-exclusive games as central to its differentiation. ^[3] Caesars' full-year 2025 digital net revenue hit $1.41 billion, up 21%, with iCasino revenue specifically up 28% and management citing new in-house live-gaming studios in Michigan and Atlantic City alongside the rollout of three proprietary slot games as core growth drivers. ^[4] [5]

Light & Wonder Ditches Monopoly

Light & Wonder, the industry's largest content studio, let its 27-year Hasbro license for Monopoly-branded slots lapse at the end of 2025. Chief Product Officer Nathan Drane said that the company’s portfolio mix is now based on performance, and as proprietary brands such as Huff N' Puff grew, the company shifted more of its portfolio to reflect player preferences." ^[6]

Light & Wonder is favoring owned IP because it gives the developer full creative and commercial control. The provider can evolve the characters, expand into new settings, bundle brands together, and release the same great content across all channels and markets.

Bragg Gaming, another major US slot provider, is also seeing stronger margins as it shifts towards in-house content. According to the company's SEC filings, gross profit margin increased by 612 basis points year-over-year to 56.0% in Q1 2025. Bragg attributed the improvement directly to growth in proprietary content, which reached a record 15.5% of total revenue during the quarter. ^[7]

What Branded Slots Are Still Crushing It?

IGT's 2023 renewal of Wheel of Fortune with Sony Pictures Television is a decade-long bet that some IP still pays for itself, and Wheel of Fortune has the track record to justify it. Since the franchise's 1996 casino debut, IGT's Wheel of Fortune games have paid out more than $3.5 billion in jackpots and awarded more than 1,100 jackpots exceeding $1 million. ^[8]

Few branded titles come close to that scale, and IGT and BetMGM have already extended the brand further by launching the first brand-led online casino in North America under the Wheel of Fortune name.

A branded slot with near-universal name recognition can lower the barrier to a first click for a casual or lapsed player who knows the title before they know the operator. However, the days of turning any blockbuster movie into a slot and expecting a flood of new players to seek it out are over.