Microgaming

Microgaming's early advantage was a complete platform — casino software, games and back office — sold to operators who wanted to launch quickly. Through the 2000s it added a poker network, one of the largest of the era, and a catalogue that ran to hundreds of slots. The Isle of Man's licensing regime, which Microgaming helped shape, gave it a respectable base at a time when much of the industry was offshore.

Mega Moolah, launched in 2006, became the defining product: a networked progressive jackpot fed by bets across many operators, which paid several of the largest online jackpots ever recorded, including a win of more than €18 million in 2018. The game showed operators what a shared jackpot could do for acquisition and gave Microgaming a franchise no rival could copy quickly.

From the mid-2010s the company shifted from making everything itself to distributing content from independent studios through its platform, and in 2021 its games distribution business was sold and became Games Global.

Microgaming defined the supplier role. Operators learned to buy their platform and content rather than build them, aggregation began as a single supplier's catalogue before it became a category of its own, and networked jackpots proved that a supplier could own a product that crossed operator boundaries. The company's later move from studio to distributor foreshadowed the aggregator model most of the market now uses.

An operator launching in 2008 signs with Microgaming for the platform, several hundred games and poker network access, then adds Mega Moolah to its lobby. Ten years later the same operator runs a multi-supplier lobby through an aggregator, but the jackpot game is still the one it advertises.

• Progressive Jackpot — the mechanism Mega Moolah made famous.
• Aggregator — the model Microgaming's distribution business grew into.
• InterCasino (1996) — the rival claim to the first online casino.
• HTML5 — the technology shift its portfolio had to survive.

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