Operations beat marketing: why paid-for players leave

The most expensive player in igaming is the one you pay to acquire and then lose somewhere the marketing report never looks: a declined first payment, a bonus that fails to land, a support ticket no one answered.

Acquisition still gets the budget and the attention. Operators track cost per acquisition (CPA), registrations and first time deposits (FTDs) with forensic precision, on the assumption more players means more business. According to Mariia Baranova, COO at NuxGame, the most expensive losses often happen after the player is won – when marketing data stops and operations begin. 

EGR: When an operator loses a player they paid real money to acquire, how often is that a targeting problem, and how often is it operational?

Mariia Baranova (MB): It is rarely only one or the other. You do have to check the traffic first – where players come from, how they move through the funnel and whether they convert into first deposits, not just registrations. That part is important.

But when we talk about real casino growth, the bigger problem is usually operational. Plenty of operators can acquire players. Far fewer know how to keep them active and carry them from a first deposit to a second, a third and beyond.

After the FTD, the main questions are: does the player come back and what do they play? Can they access support easily when something goes wrong? Are payments working? And do we honestly know where players drop, and why?

Most of the time, nobody can answer that last one. The failure is rarely where the report points: a player gives up at the cashier, a bonus never credits, a support reply comes two days too late – and weeks later it surfaces as ‘weak retention’, with no one tracing it back. That is what happens when these things sit in separate boxes – onboarding, payments, CRM, bonuses, support and reporting. They are one system. Run it well and you grow. Otherwise, you are just paying to acquire players who leave. 

EGR: Most of the damage seems to happen in the first few minutes – registration, verification, the first deposit. What breaks there, and why does a failed first payment cost more than operators assume?

MB: The first mistake is treating pre-FTD as one funnel – registered players versus depositors. It isn’t one step. A player can register, pass KYC, open the cashier, pick a method, attempt a payment and still get declined – and a hard decline is a different problem from a recoverable one no one caught. Each is its own point of failure; most operators only see the two ends.

The first payment matters because it happens at the highest-intent moment. The player isn’t browsing anymore; they’re trying to give you money. If it fails there, you don’t just lose the transaction. You lose the media cost, the bonus, all the effort spent getting them this far, and the lifetime value (LTV) of someone who may never come back.

This is why a global acceptance rate is misleading. It can read around 90% globally and still sit at 60% in one market, where the same provider is killing conversion. The average hides it. You have to read payments by country, method, provider, device – or you never see where the money is leaking.

EGR: Once a player is in, the failures get quieter: uncredited bonuses, games that do not load, slow support. Which does the most damage, and how are they connected? 

MB: Once a player has deposited, the platform isn’t the question anymore. Now it’s about fit: retention doesn’t look the same in every market, and most igaming software is built as if it does. What keeps a player in one market (cashback, say) does nothing in another, where it might be tournaments, missions or VIP treatment. Crypto players are different again; they expect fast withdrawals, higher limits, content built around them. So, an uncredited bonus or a game that won’t load isn’t really the problem. It’s the symptom of an operator that never worked out what its players value, and keeps firing the same campaigns anyway. I once watched an operator run the same campaigns for Europe and Asia and write off the weak retention in Asia as a traffic problem. It wasn’t – the offer just didn’t fit how that market played. That is the kind of thing you only catch if someone owns the whole picture. 

Support is the other place it breaks. Most players won’t tell you something went wrong – they just stop depositing and move on. So, the ones who do reach out matter twice as much: a quick, personal reply pulls them back; a slow or templated one loses them for good. And this is especially true with high-value players, who tend to carry the bulk of the profit.

So, none of these failures are really a separate problem. To the player it is one casino, either one that understands how they play or one that doesn’t. 

EGR: How does disconnected reporting hide churn, and what has to change to fix it? 

MB: Disconnected reporting hides churn because the operator only sees fragments. Churn shows up as a single end number, while the actual reason happened weeks earlier and somewhere else: a withdrawal that dragged on or a payment method that stopped converting in one market. The team responsible for the churn number never sees the cause.

The more dangerous gap runs the other way. A campaign can look like your best one all month and actually be feeding bonus abusers who never turn into revenue. This is not a fringe risk: bonus abuse is now one of the largest categories of fraud in igaming – by Sumsub’s 2025 count, close to two-thirds of all fraud in the sector. Fraud is a profession now, and those blind spots are exactly what it hunts for.

Usually, no single person is even responsible for the whole journey – one team has payments, another has the CRM, another has support – and nobody has the player. So fixing churn starts with reporting that follows one player across the whole journey – deposit, repeat deposit, bonus, support, withdrawal – and shows not just where they dropped, but what it cost and whether the fix worked. Without that, you are not running the business. You are guessing.

Mariia Baranova is the COO at NuxGame, an igaming software provider that has grown into a full ecosystem for operators. After eight years in account management, most recently as head of account management at NuxGame, she now runs the operation behind the platform.