A debate is building across iGaming over where engagement ends and exploitation begins, and few people are better placed to comment than the product teams building the games players return to every day. Shalva Bukia, Chief Product Officer at SPRIBE, argues that iGaming player wellbeing should sit inside product design from the outset, rather than arrive afterwards as a compliance layer bolted on top.
A Conversation Product Teams Need to Lead
Bukia believes the industry conversation about engagement versus exploitation is overdue, and that it should not be left to compliance departments alone to define.
“When we created Aviator, and every product since, we made a deliberate decision to build games that people want to return to, without relying on manipulative design patterns to keep them there,” he says. “That’s a very important distinction that a lot of people in the industry are unwilling to acknowledge.”
For Bukia, every design decision carries an ethical dimension, whether the team building the game frames it in those terms or not. How a feedback loop is structured, how losses are handled, and what cues appear between rounds all shape how a player experiences the product, well before any responsible gambling tool comes into play.
Why Transparency Sits at the Centre of Crash Game Design
Crash games such as Aviator are, by their nature, more transparent than many other casino formats. The multiplier rises in real time, the player decides when to cash out, and the outcome is visible to everyone in the session simultaneously.
Bukia points to what is deliberately absent from the format as much as what is present. There are no hidden bonus rounds, no near-miss animations designed to keep someone playing beyond their original intention, and no opaque RNG mechanics obscured behind layers of visual noise.
Understanding Every Outcome
“A player who loses in Aviator understands exactly why, and the same goes when they win,” Bukia says. “The mechanic respects the player’s intelligence, and in our experience, players respond to that with loyalty.”
That framing sets crash games apart from formats built around obscured mechanics, where the gap between what a player sees and what is actually happening behind the interface can be considerable.
Does Responsible Design Cost Engagement?
Part of the industry still assumes that designing with player wellbeing in mind means sacrificing engagement metrics. Bukia disputes that framing directly, pointing to Aviator’s scale as evidence.
According to SPRIBE, Aviator has more than 77 million monthly active players and processes upwards of 400,000 bets per minute. Bukia attributes those numbers to a game players trust and choose to return to on their own terms, rather than one engineered around dark patterns.
The social dimension of the game plays into this. Players can see each other’s decisions in real time, chat during sessions, and compete through tournaments and missions, giving the experience a communal quality. Bukia says that dynamic, players coming back because they want to be part of something, is fundamentally different to someone chasing losses alone.
He also argues that manipulative mechanics tend to spike engagement briefly before players burn out, with a steep drop-off that follows. Engagement built on trust and enjoyment takes longer to establish, in his view, but it lasts, and that durability shows up in the metrics that matter most to a product team over time.
Building Safeguards Into the Product, Not Onto It
Bukia’s central frustration with the industry’s approach to responsible gaming is that it is so often treated as a compliance exercise, something added after the game is built rather than considered at the design stage.
“Those tools are important, and they need to exist,” he says of deposit limits, session timers and self-exclusion tools. “But if the only thing standing between a player and a harmful experience is a pop-up they can dismiss, we haven’t done our job as product designers.”
At SPRIBE, Bukia says player wellbeing is considered from the design stage itself. The transparency of the mechanic, the social accountability of a shared session, and the immediate feedback on every outcome would not appear on a standard responsible gaming checklist, yet they shape a healthier player experience by default because of how the product is built.
Where Product-Led Responsibility Goes Next
Regulation is tightening across most of the markets SPRIBE operates in, a trend Bukia describes as welcome, though not sufficient on its own. Minimum standards matter, he says, but good design still has to come from the teams building the product, not from a compliance checklist applied after launch.
Bukia’s view is that product teams need to think about the players they are building for as people whose time, money and trust the industry is responsible for. That principle, he argues, has shaped SPRIBE’s approach since Aviator’s launch, and underpins why the game reached its current scale in crash games without relying on manipulative retention tactics to get there.
Readers following how suppliers are approaching player wellbeing and product design more broadly can find further coverage of this kind in the Insights section of The Business of iGaming.
