After a year of strong financial performance, Managing Director Marharyta Yerina is clear that ELA Games’ growth in 2025 was driven by sharper focus rather than experimentation for its own sake.
The studio’s progress, Marharyta explains, came from knowing when to refine rather than reinvent. “We implemented a change in strategy by stopping experimenting and focused on creating products that would give us a return on investment.”
With a background in finance, ELA Games’ MD has been particularly conscious of balancing creative ambition with commercial discipline. That recalibration paid off quickly. “I believe the slots that we produced in Q3 and Q4 2025 were better quality and of greater interest to players,” she underlines.
Market expansion also played a role, with Greece emerging as a standout performer. But Marharyta is quick to stress that success there was grounded in preparation rather than assumption. “We’ve found that Greek players don’t just like stereotypical mythic titles but shooters and interactive games,” she notes.
The real advantage came from understanding those preferences before launch. “The underlying reason for our success in Greece was our research ahead of market entry into player preferences.”
Rather than tailoring every release to individual jurisdictions, Marharyta frames player behaviour more broadly. “I wouldn’t say that each market’s player base has specific requirements,” she sets out.
Instead, ELA Games divides the global audience into three core groups: players who prefer classic fruit and card games; those drawn to more innovative, instant-style formats; and a growing segment focused primarily on experience.
Experience as Differentiation
While ELA Games doesn’t develop instant games directly, perception still matters. “Players recognise Winpots as instants because you can create a strategy to a certain extent in this format,” she says. For experience-led players, however, animation quality, visual identity, and immersion are decisive – and increasingly central to ELA Games’ design direction.
That emphasis on experience has shaped some of the studio’s strongest recent releases. Buffalo Force marked a milestone as ELA Games’ first high-risk title. “Because of the high-risk design the game has become increasingly popular with players,” Marharyta explains.
Pinatas Festival, meanwhile, represented a creative turning point. “This was our first game that we crafted with great care,” highlighting the attention paid to music, colour, animation, and overall presentation.
Those same creative priorities were brought to life at ICE Barcelona, where ELA Games concluded a standout week by turning its booth into a physical extension of its design philosophy. Rather than a conventional stand, the space was built to immerse visitors in the world of Wealth of the East – the studio’s headline title and a clear signal of its ambitions in Asian-themed content.
Wealth of the East was first revealed to the industry during the expo where it drew attention for its blend of familiar slot structures with mechanics more commonly associated with tabletop gaming. At the centre of the experience was a large dragon installation that became both a visual anchor and a natural meeting point, reinforcing the game’s festival-inspired theme.
The atmosphere was deliberately tactile and interactive. Visitors, including G3, were offered tea ceremony gift sets and custom fortune cookies, while other ELA Games titles were represented through hands-on experiences such as a Cash Crab claw machine that drew crowds throughout the show. Live demos ran continuously, with the team walking operators through the mechanics and design choices behind each title.
For Marharyta, the response validated the studio’s direction. “Asia is one of our core ambitions for 2026,” she confirms, pointing to Wealth of the East as a key step in that journey. “What makes Wealth of the East unique is the combination of different mechanics within the game including dice.”
At the heart of the game is a twenty-sided dice feature designed to introduce a sense of tactility and unpredictability into the slot experience. The game’s prosperity deity, God Fu, acts as a Wild symbol, activating dice-driven outcomes that can unlock multipliers or instant jackpots.
A progression system feeds into a Hold & Win-style feature, with coins visibly accumulating towards a trigger – reinforcing Marharyta’s belief in games that feel dynamic and event-driven rather than repetitive.
Growth with Partners
Beyond product design, transparency has become another defining pillar of ELA Games’ strategy. “We are happy to share the data insights that we have for our partners,” Marharyta explains. As a relatively young studio, openness helps build trust and credibility. “By showing the results we are facilitating new partnerships.”
That transparency supports a broader ambition. “ELA Games’ primary goal is to grow with our partners,” she stresses. Sharing performance data helps demonstrate that the studio is offering something genuinely differentiated. “Our design philosophy is for every new release to be better than the previous one.”
Looking ahead, ELA Games is preparing to increase its output, with plans to release six games per quarter in 2026. Marharyta views that pace as manageable. “Six games per quarter isn’t a particularly large amount of games as other studios produce more.”
The studio plans to expand its team and continue investing in technology, drawing on experience across land-based, social casino, and online environments.
Alongside core releases, new promotional tools are also on the roadmap. “ELA Games will be releasing jackpot tools in Q1,” Marharyta confirms, positioning them as a way to improve player interaction and deepen engagement with partners.
When asked to define priorities for the year ahead, Marharyta keeps it simple. “There are two main priorities. Growth and satisfaction.” Growth across markets, titles, partnerships, and financial performance, and satisfaction measured through retention, collaboration, and consistent delivery.
“Satisfaction is about player retention, growing with our partners and providing high quality support and content.”
Taken together, ELA Games’ presence at ICE Barcelona – and the conversations it sparked – reflect a studio increasingly confident in its direction. By pairing disciplined strategy with immersive creativity, Marharyta and her team are laying the groundwork for the next phase of growth, one built on focus, experience, and intent rather than excess.
The post How ELA Games Reset its Growth Strategy appeared first on G3 Newswire.
After a year of strong financial performance, Managing Director Marharyta Yerina is clear that ELA Games’ growth in 2025 was driven by sharper focus rather than experimentation for its own sake. The studio’s progress, Marharyta explains, came from knowing when to refine rather than reinvent. “We implemented a change in strategy by stopping experimenting and…
The post How ELA Games Reset its Growth Strategy appeared first on G3 Newswire.