There’s a Swahili saying, kuzima koleo si mwisho wa uhunzi: cooling the tongs is not the end of forging. Stellar Bets won Retail Provider of the Year at the iGaming AFRIKA Summit Awards on 6 May, and if there’s a version of that proverb for retail iGaming, it’s something like this: winning an award is not the end of shipping product.
We didn’t spend much time celebrating it. An award you can point to is a nice thing to have, and then Monday comes around the same as it always does, except now there’s a longer list of people watching what you do next than there was the week before.
This list turned out to be much longer than we expected, and this piece kept being postponed and rewritten over the course of a month. While the market usually cools down in summer and vacation season sets in for many, our development team kept shipping release after release, update after update. The number of partners we work with on the ground kept growing, and each one wanted to be first to try and test our products in the field. In turn, we kept receiving operator feedback and refining everything to near perfection before every update or release, practically in real time.
The Stellar Bets Football update came first at the end of May, and it didn’t ship until we had tested several versions in live venues and kept the one that held up best: faster load and round times, and a work for client improvements. Stellar Bets Lobby went live on 29 June. July was heavier. Stellar Bets Kiosk put 20+ titles behind the same device.
Then, in late July, two updates to Stellar Bets Rocket. Every connected device now runs its own round, its own odds, its own multipliers, instead of mirroring one round across the whole floor, and each screen can carry its own skin. Neither feature does anything for a venue running a single Stellar Bets Rocket install, which was deliberate: it is built for operators who already scaled past one screen, not as an argument to. Shipping changes to the game that earns the most, in the weeks before high season, is not comfortable.
We still cannot tell you what device in a venue is really worth it before a second screen becomes the only one way up. A new outlet connects, and its screens run in bursts, three days one week, two evenings the next, and even a full month of that tells you very little. Each of these six releases pushed on that question from a different side.
After tests, a lot of work, meetings with our partners, and genuine field feedback from clients, the answer turned out to be much wider than the industry standard previously assumed. At first, it might seem that multi-game retail screens aren’t the best invention, especially compared to online, where placing a catalog with any number of titles costs practically nothing. But at land-based retail venues, this is a completely different problem, because every operator is essentially competing for the device itself they want represented, not the game running on it. That’s precisely why placing a full catalog in front of one player on one screen is risky for hall owners: by splitting the end user’s attention across several titles, what you end up with is roughly the same engagement your flagship game would have generated on its own, from that same device.
We’d put the stability problems in the same category: the products themselves and the hardware they run on. Especially when the catalog is large, and not every title can run as stably as the demo version you tested beforehand. All the more so because hardware that worked fine in a one-game, one-device format can’t always handle the new format. Both of these are risks owners have to account for if they want to keep pace with the industry and the times. That’s exactly why it’s also fair to think this category and format are still developing very slowly.
The difference between providers and suppliers isn’t in who has the longer list of products, functions, and features. It’s in who’s willing to take on these risks and actually close them for customers a priori, not just when they’re pushing hard on the installation, but in how stable the products stay, and especially in how closely they control the statistics that actually decide the business: profitability and RTP. Watch your own metrics and their stability the same way, not within two or three hours over a couple of days’ conclusions. Over every long cycle, like a month, a quarter, a year.
Why So Many Halls Still Run One Game
From the outside, there’s a textbook answer to why a betting hall keeps running one game year after year: rent, and the cost of every extra terminal. In the rooms we work with, the reason is simpler and more practical.
Most of the outlets we connect are small: one room, two or three terminals, and often a single cashier behind the counter. Our preferred partners are operators with at least 15 to 20 shops in a country, but a big part of the market is single-shop owners, and they’re the ones we mean here. They’re often left without much support from suppliers. We partner with them too, and many have grown a lot since they started with us. We remember where they began, most of them from scratch, and what they ran into along the way. Owners like these decide on what they’ve seen work. For a business that size, a game that fills the room every evening is a proven result, and changing it is a real risk. We understand that, and it shapes how we ship.
It’s also why the single crash game on the main screen usually stays. Players know it, owners know it, and it works. An owner has every reason to trust that over any supplier’s promise. That’s why our releases go through partners’ venues first: we’d rather an owner learn about a result from real work in the market than from a figure on paper in our presentation. Single shops are also the best place to test a product. And the partnership only makes sense if, over the long run, everyone in it comes out ahead.
Players are just as clear about what they want, and they tell us directly. They notice a lot of details inside, rhythm, for example: if a round runs out of its usual pace, even slightly, it costs the game their trust. They also told us a 13-15 second round felt too long. That feedback is behind the faster rounds in our latest updates to Stellar Bets Rocket and Stellar Bets Football, and it’s why we test changes like that in live venues before they ship. A faster round is welcome. An uneven one isn’t.
For a lot of players, a round in the hall is a break after a working day, and what they want is a game that’s quick to understand and keeps the pace up. Variety only works for that player if it costs nothing to understand. That’s why Stellar Bets Kiosk leaves Stellar Bets Rocket and Stellar Bets Football exactly as players already know them, and why Autobet made it into this year’s updates. That’s the player we design for, and most of what we changed in Stellar Bets Rocket this summer started with what they told us.
Updates to the Two Crash Games
Stellar Bets Rocket is our flagship, and for many of our partners it’s the game their business grew on. That’s why most of this summer’s work went into it and why a lot of it started as requests from those partners. We haven’t put all of it into our own posts, so this is the first time it’s all in one place.
Part of it is what players asked for directly: an optimization release that made Stellar Bets Rocket faster. UFO Bonus payouts also went up, and they still land without affecting the round’s outcome.
If you already run Stellar Bets Rocket on one device, look at what it’s doing in your back office: revenue, session length, and rounds played. For many of our partners, those numbers were reason enough to want a second Rocket device, and they asked us to make it worth having. Until July, two Rocket devices in one shop showed the same round.
With Unique Rounds, each connected device now runs its own independent round, with its own odds and multipliers, so two devices play like two different games, and a player at the counter screen and a player on their phone no longer watch the same outcome twice. We went further with Rocket Skins, which let an operator give each device a look of its own.
Both are opt-in through the back office and need at least two Stellar Bets Rocket devices at a location. If Rocket is paying its way on one device and another device in the same room is running a game that isn’t, the decision makes itself.
September’s release works on a different moment: the one right after a round ends. Safe Chance gives Stellar Bets Rocket a parachute. When a round ends before the player cashes out, the parachute gives them a chance to have their bet returned. A feature like that invites an obvious question about the margin. Safe Chance runs with no change to the game’s RTP;
AI-Powered RTP, the system we built in-house, holds it where it was. We didn’t release it until partners on the ground had run it on their own floors, and across those venues, session length per player, the number of bets, and revenue per device each grew by more than 28%. With RTP unchanged, all of that is additional play at the margin those venues already had. Autobet shipped alongside it and needs less explaining, since most crash players already know the tool: set a bet once, and the game keeps placing it round after round.
Stellar Bets Football was updated twice this year, two months apart. We think the gap between them is the more interesting part.
March’s update changed the mechanic itself, not the visuals around it. Trickster Mode, “Freestyle Frenzy,” makes the round accelerate: the multiplier’s climb speeds up mid-round instead of holding a flat curve, and the game’s pace lifts with it. That’s a different kind of hook than most crash games run on. It isn’t a game you size up in a round or two and then either keep playing or don’t.
It opens up the longer you stay in it, which is a large part of why the engagement numbers moved the way they did, a 38% lift against Football’s own average crash-game benchmark. We built March’s update specifically to push further into that fast-paced feel, and the result came back stronger than we’d targeted.
May went a different direction: no new mechanic, just development and optimization work on the one already shipped. Faster load and round times, a more stable client, more completed rounds per session. We don’t have clean data separating how much of the completed-rounds gain came from load speed versus client stability, since both went out in the same release.
What we do have is the combined result holding up on actual terminals in actual outlets, not just in testing, which is the test that matters more in retail than it would online.
For a lot of players, retail is where they meet this category before they ever touch it online. What a brand’s game experience feels like on the ground travels with them into whatever comes next, and most players end up online eventually, one way or another. That isn’t something retail can prevent. What retail can do is make sure it doesn’t lose the player when that happens.
HomePlay exists for exactly that reason, less a feature than a bridge we built on purpose, so a retail location keeps the relationship with a player instead of handing them off to whichever app they land on next.
Retail also leaves nowhere to hide. Players in a hall are sharp, and they pay attention. They notice the smallest change in how a game behaves; a problem can’t be hidden from them, and a small mistake won’t go unnoticed. Online, a game can go up on a site and be left alone for months. On a retail floor, you keep pace with your players or you fall behind them, and that means listening to them all the time. The best suppliers go one step further and hear what players want before they ask.
Stellar Bets Kiosk: A Full Menu for One Player
Stellar Bets Kiosk takes the opposite route from a shared screen. One player. One dedicated terminal. A full menu of games instead of a single title.
A full menu in front of one player is exactly the setup that looks risky on paper. Three months of testing in live venues showed us something else. A player alone at the terminal, with no one else’s round on the screen and nobody to keep up with, plays differently. Sessions run longer and more rounds get played. Players also bet more, both in total and per round, and all of it shows up in what each terminal earns.
Kiosk runs a wide range of titles across crash, instant, and slot formats, including Stellar Bets’ own signature instant games, Stellar Bets PlinkDrop and Stellar Bets Piggy chief among them, all inside one interface. The platform currently carries 20+ titles, and more are on the way. It’s built for stable single-player play, including on the weak connections common outside the big cities.
Money still goes through the cashier. When a player wants to top up, they request it on the terminal, the screen locks, and the cashier confirms the amount from behind the counter before the game opens again. Cashing out works the same way. Venues already handled this by hand, so for staff it’s a routine they know, now inside the software.
If a player has to leave before they’re done, HomePlay lets them scan a QR code on the screen and carry on from their own phone with the same balance. And Kiosk doesn’t ask the shop to buy anything first: it goes onto the PC that’s already there, and even an older machine can take it from a USB stick. For a shop with two or three terminals, a product that needs new hardware before the first round usually doesn’t get tried at all.
Stellar Bets Lobby: Variety on the Shared Screen
Where Kiosk gives one player a terminal of their own, Stellar Bets Lobby is built for a shared screen. It runs on top of the crash games an outlet already operates: Stellar Bets Rocket and Stellar Bets Football stay exactly as players know them, and around them the operator can add shorter instant and slot-style rounds with Stellar Bets Piggy, Stellar Bets PlinkDrop and Stellar Bets Fruits. Up to eight players can use one Lobby screen at once. That sounds like a lot until you’ve seen a busy counter on a Friday evening, with five or six people waiting on the one free terminal for their turn. We built Lobby for that crowd.
The operator decides which games appear, not the platform. A parlor that wants to stay focused on crash games can run Stellar Bets Rocket and Stellar Bets Football with one casual title alongside, and a hall with a wider mix of players can run the full set. We didn’t want to choose the catalog for anyone. Whoever runs the room knows what works in it, and what works in a Nairobi storefront isn’t always what works in Kampala.
We designed Lobby to lift retention and revenue by up to 75% compared to a single-game screen. The reason is simple: a player who doesn’t win on Stellar Bets Rocket can move to another game on the same screen instead of walking out. And Lobby runs on the screen or terminal the outlet already has, so there’s nothing new to buy.
Rollout, Without Disruption
A betting hall can’t close for a week while staff learn something new. Installing our products doesn’t take the room offline, and in practice the install is rarely what slows a rollout down. What slows it down is a player pointing at the new screen and asking what changed, while nobody behind the counter has a confident answer yet.
That’s one reason Stellar Bets Rocket and Stellar Bets Football look exactly the same inside Lobby: staff only have to learn the selection screen, not explain a new game. With Kiosk, the part staff deal with most, topping up and cashing out, works the way they already did it by hand. And an owner who wants to see Kiosk before putting it on a terminal can open it in a browser first.
The back office doesn’t lose sight of anything either. An operator still sees how each game performs on each terminal, even when one screen now runs four titles instead of one. If a title isn’t pulling its weight, the venue manager can see it in the numbers and swap it out in a few taps, with no support ticket and no technician visit. A setting that’s this easy to change actually gets changed, and that’s what keeps a screen earning after the first month.
Third-Party Validation: An Award, Then a Nomination
Stellar Bets won Retail Provider of the Year at the iGaming AFRIKA Summit Awards in Nairobi this May. We’ve described it publicly as going “from zero to Best Retail Provider of the Year within just one year,” and the timeline backs that up. Managing Director Purity Wahiu was recognized that same season separately with the SBEA+ Celebrating Women In Gaming award.
Lobby made its first public appearance at that same Summit, shown on our stand as “Lobby Instant Games” next to Stellar Bets Mini Games and Stellar Bets Virtual Sports, less than two months before its full rollout on 29 June. So the award went to games that were already running in real outlets, while the next ones were still on the stand as previews.
A second recognition came in July. Stellar Bets was shortlisted for Land-Based Betting & Gaming Product at the SBC Awards 2026, one of 11 companies in a category that draws land-based and gaming technology suppliers from well beyond Africa. It’s a nomination, not a result yet: the winner is announced at SBC Summit in Lisbon on 1 October. Still, it’s the second time this year that people outside the company have looked at what we’re shipping in African retail and singled it out.
Stellar Bets now operates across 9 markets with more than 4,500 devices, a footprint wide enough that everything in this piece comes from our own venues, not from assumptions. An award doesn’t prove a product on its own. What it does show is that people looking at the market from the outside saw what our partners were already seeing on their floors.
What This Means for Operators Making 2026 Decisions
For an operator planning the rest of 2026, the most useful numbers are already in the back office: what each device earned last month, and how steady that has been over a quarter rather than one good weekend. It’s the test we hold our own games to before they ship, and it’s a fair one to hold any supplier to, us included.
A device that earns makes the next step easy, and for many of our partners that step has been a second Stellar Bets Rocket beside the first. A device that doesn’t earn raises a different question: what it’s running, and whether something else would do better in the same spot.
That’s where we’d point operators to Stellar Bets Kiosk. After three months of testing in live venues, we’re confident in what a single-player terminal with a full menu can do, and it runs on a PC the shop already has. For smaller operators running a handful of shops, where every extra device is money straight out of the owner’s pocket, that matters.
The games keep moving too. Stellar Bets Football changed twice this year and Stellar Bets Rocket changed all summer, and most of those changes started with what players and partners told us. A game isn’t finished when it ships. The supplier’s job is to keep closing the risks that come after, from stability on older hardware to keeping RTP where it should be, and that’s the part of the work we take most seriously.
Retail in our markets rewards suppliers who stay close to the floor. Owners trust what they’ve seen work, and players tell you plainly what they want. Neither gives a product much of a second chance. We’d rather earn that trust venue by venue than ask for it up front.
None of this is a finished list. More titles and more updates are already in motion, and each will be tested in partner venues before it ships. The next place to see them is SBC Summit in Lisbon, from 29 September to 1 October. On Thursday, 1 October, we’re presenting our latest products on the Product Innovation Showcase Stage at the Feira Internacional de Lisboa, and that evening the SBC Awards winners are announced at the MEO Arena. Our team will be at the Summit, and we’d be glad to see you there. To set up a meeting in Lisbon, or to follow what ships next, find us at stellar-bets.com.
