How much does it cost to build a live casino studio?

No supplier this desk read publishes a per-table price for a live casino studio. Pragmatic Play’s Bogotá studio was announced at over $15 million for more than 100 tables, roughly $150,000 a table on this desk’s arithmetic. Kerma Games is building four tables in Monterrey. Presenters are the recurring cost, and no supplier document this desk read states a wage.

That is the honest answer to “how much does it cost to build a live casino studio”, and it is shorter than the question deserves. The pages currently holding the search results are software-development agencies quoting a single unsourced range for “live dealer games” and a three-year-old guide to opening a casino that never uses the word studio. What follows is the cost model built from the components, with every number attributed to a document and every gap stated as a gap. This desk read Evolution’s January-June 2026 interim report as mirrored by Modular Finance, Yogonet’s report of the Bogotá opening, Kerma’s Monterrey job posting and the ranked agency pages on 11 September 2026.

What goes into the cost to build a live casino studio?

A live studio is a television studio that happens to deal cards. The capital line items are the same on every floor, whether it has four tables or a hundred:

• Tables and rigs. Each table is a physical set: the table itself, a wheel or shoe, a presenter’s position, three or more cameras, and the capture rig that reads the outcome of every card, spin or roll and pushes it to the game server as data. Optical card recognition and wheel sensors are what turn a video feed into a settled bet. This is the unit of capacity, which is why suppliers count studios in tables.
• Floor space and fit-out. Lighting, acoustics, set dressing and enough square metres for the tables plus the control room. Studios are described by table count, not floor area, in every announcement this desk read, so no square-metre figure appears here.
• Streaming and control. Encoding, low-latency distribution, the control room that monitors every feed, and the integration into operators’ platforms. This is the slice the agency pages are actually pricing when they quote a “live dealer” figure.
• Certification and market entry. Testing-lab certification of the studio’s outcome capture and platform against the standards a jurisdiction requires. A cost line, and one that none of the documents read puts a price on.

The operating cost sits on top of all of that, and it is the larger number over any horizon longer than a year. A table with no presenter is furniture.

What do the suppliers actually disclose?

The information most worth having is what listed and private suppliers say about their own studios. This desk went looking for a capex-per-table figure in the public record and did not find one. Here is what the documents do say.

Two things stand out. First, only one of the four discloses money, and it discloses it as a floor: “over $15 million” for “over 100 tables”. Divide one by the other and the result, about $150,000 a table, is this desk’s arithmetic and an order-of-magnitude indication, not a supplier’s figure. It also includes 1,500 jobs’ worth of recruitment and fit-out for a full-service studio with Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking presenters, so it is a loaded number, not a price for a table and a camera.

Second, the one listed supplier, whose figures are the only ones here from a stock-exchange release, says the least about studios. Evolution’s interim report for January-June 2026 reports Q2 net revenues of EUR 517.8 million, down 1.2 percent, and EBITDA of EUR 341.0 million at a 65.9 percent margin; for the half-year, net revenues of EUR 1,030.8 million and EBITDA of EUR 676.3 million. The chief executive’s statement records that the group “opened our second studio in Michigan” and “re-launched the newly acquired studio in Argentina” in the quarter. What the release text does not contain is a capex figure for either, or a count of live tables. The group’s own About Us line is the closest thing to a capacity number: it “currently employs ~22,900 people in studios across Europe, Asia, North and South America” and serves 870 operators. The full PDF may carry more; it returned to this desk as an unreadable binary, so nothing from it is asserted here.

How much does a live casino studio cost per table?

Put the two available figures side by side and the shape of the answer appears.

At the top of the range, Pragmatic Play’s Bogotá build implies about $150,000 a table, fully loaded, for a 100-plus-table studio delivered and operated by ARRISE, with both network and dedicated tables and “Smart Studio technology” for operator branding. That is a studio built to sell dedicated tables to many operators at once, which is the business model that justifies the spend: a dedicated table is rented to one operator and priced accordingly, and a network table is shared and priced on volume. The per-table figure at that scale is amortised over the studio’s control room, encoding and back-office, which do not scale one-for-one with tables.

At the bottom, Kerma’s Monterrey posting describes “four live gaming tables, including Blackjack, Baccarat, Roulette, and Craps” producing “English-language live casino content for international markets”. A four-table studio carries the same fixed control-room and streaming cost as a larger one across a twenty-fifth of the tables, so the per-table figure will be higher, and the absolute figure lower. Kerma states neither. Trivelta bought Kerma on undisclosed terms while the studio was still recruiting, so the acquirer’s price is no help either.

Between them sits the number the search results actually serve: the agency page at the top of the ranking, Simpltry, lists “Live Dealer Games” at “$50,000 – $200,000+”, with a note that this covers “streaming infrastructure, low-latency video, dealer studio integration, real-time sync”. Read that carefully. It is a price for software that connects to a studio, not for a studio. No source is attached, and the page’s own closing range for all casino games starts at $15,000. It is not wrong so much as answering a different question, and it says nothing about what the table, the rig, the room or the presenters cost.

So the honest per-table answer has three parts: about $150,000 fully loaded at industrial scale, on one supplier’s announced floors; an unknown but higher unit cost at four-table scale, on one supplier’s silence; and $50,000 to $200,000-plus for the integration software, on an agency’s unsourced word. Anyone quoting a single number for the whole thing is guessing, and most of the pages that do are selling the software slice.

What does a live studio cost to run?

The capital cost is paid once. The presenters are paid every hour the tables are open, and the tables are open every hour.

None of the documents this desk read, Evolution’s release text, Kerma’s posting, the Yogonet report and the ranked agency pages, states a presenter wage. Kerma’s posting is explicit about the shape of the job, “Good level of English (C1)” and “Availability to work rotating shifts”, and silent on the pay. That silence is why the “live casino dealer salary” question that searchers ask has no attributable answer here.

What can be counted is the shift arithmetic. A seat dealt around the clock is 168 hours a week. At a 40-hour week that is 4.2 presenter positions per seat before holidays, sickness, breaks and training cover, so a four-table studio dealing 24/7 needs somewhere around twenty presenters on the rota, and a 100-table studio needs several hundred. That is this desk’s division, not a supplier’s headcount, but Pragmatic Play’s own announcement is consistent with it: “more than 1,500 new jobs” for “over 100 tables” is 15 jobs a table, and those jobs include presenters, pit supervisors, control-room, technical and back-office roles. The ratio is derived from two floors and should be read as an indication.

Evolution gives the group-level version. EUR 1,030.8 million of half-year net revenue across roughly 22,900 employees is about EUR 45,000 of revenue per employee per half-year, and EUR 676.3 million of EBITDA is about EUR 29,500 per employee. Both are this desk’s arithmetic from two figures in the same release, the headcount is the company’s own approximation, and neither is a wage. What they show is the operating model: a business whose main cost is people can still run a 65 percent EBITDA margin when the tables are full, because a dealt hand costs the same whether ten players or ten thousand are betting on it. The margin is the argument for building studios; the headcount is the reason it is expensive to be wrong about demand.

Language is the other opex multiplier. Evolution’s chief executive cites “continued demand for native-speaking tables”; Pragmatic Play’s Bogotá studio is staffed by “native Spanish and Portuguese-speaking dealers”; Kerma is hiring C1 English speakers in Mexico to serve “international markets”. A native-language table is a table that can only be staffed from a smaller labour pool, which is a cost, and can be sold into markets where a generic English table cannot, which is the revenue that pays for it. The trade-off is the whole business case for the regional studios Evolution and Pragmatic Play keep opening, a strategy assessed on this site in August.

How do live casino studios work?

For readers arriving from the cost question rather than the trade, the mechanism in a paragraph. A studio is a set of physical tables, each with a presenter, cameras and a rig that captures the outcome of every card, spin or roll and pushes it to the operator’s platform alongside the video stream. The player’s bets are placed in software; the outcome is read from the physical table; settlement happens on the platform. The presenter never touches money. The studio sells access to that feed to operators, either as a shared network table that many operators show, or as a dedicated table that one operator brands as its own. Pragmatic Play’s Bogotá site offers both, “with Smart Studio technology, allowing operators greater branding and customisation”.

Two things follow for cost. The capacity unit is a table, so a studio’s capex scales with tables and its opex scales with staffed hours. And the rig is the part that has to be certified, because it is where a physical event becomes a settled bet; that is the line that testing labs and regulators care about, and the one none of the documents read here prices.

Turnkey studio or owned studio?

The build-or-buy question sits under all of this, and the four documents read describe four different answers.

Evolution owns and staffs its studios and reports the whole thing as one group, which is why its release gives revenue, margin and headcount but no studio-level capex. Pragmatic Play’s Bogotá studio is “delivered and operated by ARRISE, a service provider to the iGaming industry”, so the operating cost sits with a services company and the content brand sells the tables. Kerma is building its own four tables and was bought mid-build by a platform vendor whose chief executive filed the studio under “an ambitious product roadmap”. And the Awager arrangement on BetMGM puts fifty physical slot cabinets on camera rather than dealt tables, which is a different capex profile again: the machines are the capacity unit, and there is no presenter per seat.

For an operator, the alternative to any of this is to rent. A dedicated table from a supplier’s existing studio moves the capex to the supplier and turns it into a monthly fee, with the supplier’s branding options doing the work a proprietary studio would do. No dedicated-table fee appears in any document this desk read, and the comparison-site figures circulating for one supplier’s monthly rate were not readable at source, so none is quoted. The point stands without the number: the reason so few operators build studios is that the suppliers have already made the capital mistake on their behalf and are amortising it across 870 customers.

Questions searchers ask

How much does it cost to start a live casino?

No supplier this desk read publishes a build price. The one attributed figure is Pragmatic Play’s Bogotá studio, announced by Yogonet at an investment of over $15 million for more than 100 tables, about $150,000 a table on this desk’s arithmetic. A four-table studio like Kerma’s Monterrey build will cost a fraction of that, but Kerma states no number, and the ongoing cost is presenters on rotating shifts.

How much does it cost to develop a live dealer game?

The software-agency pages holding the search results quote $50,000 to $200,000-plus for a live dealer game, with no source attached, and that range covers the streaming and integration software only. The physical side, a table, its camera and card-recognition rig, the floor space and the presenters to staff it around the clock, is a separate budget, and none of the documents this desk read prices it.

How much does a live casino dealer make?

This desk has no verified pay figure. Kerma Games’ Monterrey posting, read on 11 September 2026, asks for C1 English and availability for rotating shifts and states no salary or range. Evolution’s H1 2026 release gives group revenue of EUR 1,030.8 million against roughly 22,900 staff, about EUR 45,000 of revenue per employee per half-year on this desk’s arithmetic, which is a productivity figure, not a wage.

How do live casino studios work?

A studio is a set of physical tables, each with a presenter, cameras and a rig that captures the outcome of every card, spin or roll and pushes it to the operator’s platform alongside the video stream. Evolution describes itself as employing about 22,900 people in studios across Europe, Asia, North and South America; Pragmatic Play’s Bogotá site is delivered and operated by ARRISE, a service provider.

What the record does not say

The gap list is as useful as the figures. No document read here gives a capex per table, a presenter wage, a dedicated-table fee, a floor area or a certification cost. Evolution’s release mentions a GBP 4.75 million settlement with the UK Gambling Commission “concluding its license review”, over its content appearing on six unlicensed websites in breach of its terms of supply; that is a cost of being in the business, stated by the company, and it is quoted here as the release words it and not as a comment on anyone’s licensing status. Anything more precise than the model above is a supplier’s private spreadsheet, and the agency pages at the top of the search results do not cite one either.

On readership: this is trade coverage for adults, not player guidance or an invitation to gamble. The question here is what a table costs the studio that builds it, and what the public record lets anyone say about that with a source attached.