Microgaming becomes Apricot: the story, and what it means for players

Microgaming was founded in 1994 on the Isle of Man, which it never left, and the first casino on its software was the Gaming Club, still on this site (our Gaming Club review records it); the players of 1996 installed a "download" client on Windows, because the "instant play" in a browser came years later. They found a few dozen games in it and learnt to recognise the slots by their look, since the same software served every house.

The business model was set early, and it explains the label. Microgaming did not run casinos; it licensed its software to operators (often groups running several brands each) and took a share of their revenue, so that the "Microgaming casino" became a family resemblance, with the same lobby and the same jackpots. Jackpot City (1998), Royal Vegas (2000), Spin Casino (2001, under its earlier name until 2019) and Platinum Play (2004) belong to that family, and their cards stand below.

In 2003 the company backed, with 888, the creation of eCOGRA in London, the testing body whose seal certifies the "RNG" (the random number generator behind each spin) and whose monthly "payout reports" several groups of the old network still publish; in our view that habit is worth more than any slogan about fairness. Our guide to legitimate casinos explains what such a seal proves and what it does not, because a seal that links nowhere is only a picture.

A "progressive" jackpot grows on a slice of each stake wagered on that game in all the casinos linked to it, until one spin takes the whole pot, and Microgaming had run jackpots of that kind since the late 1990s (Cash Splash, 1998, according to the company's own history). Mega Moolah, launched in 2006 with its savannah of lions and its wheel of four prizes (Mini, Minor, Major and Mega), became the name that defined the network.

The record entered in the Guinness book came in October 2015, when a British soldier playing at Betway turned a stake of twenty-five pence into £13.2 million. A Belgian player took €19.4 million from one of the game's versions in April 2021, and in 2019 the company had announced that its "progressive jackpot network" had paid more than one billion euros since 1998, according to its announcements of the time, which is the figure that made the name.

Those prizes have a cost, which the game's own information panel prints: the "RTP" (what a game hands back, on average, out of every hundred staked over millions of spins) of Mega Moolah is about 88 per cent, where an ordinary slot with no jackpot sits near 96, and the gap between the two is what feeds the wheel.

A player who stakes $100 on a slot at 96 gives up $4 on average, and on Mega Moolah $12, three times as much, for a ticket in a draw that falls once in tens of millions of spins! That is the price of the network, and it is paid on every spin, whether the wheel appears or not.

Quickfire, launched in 2010, let an operator plug the Microgaming catalogue into any platform through one integration, and the games of independent studios soon followed through the same door. That is why Microgaming titles began to appear in lobbies running on other software, and why the old equivalence between the games and the "Microgaming casino" started to blur a decade before the sale; the games had become a catalogue that any house could buy.

The same decade changed the casinos of the family. Their lobbies widened to NetEnt, Pragmatic Play and the "live" tables (real dealers filmed in a studio) of other studios, and a Royal Vegas lobby of 2026 carries several hundred titles. The poker rooms of the "MPN" (the Microgaming Poker Network, where the houses of the family shared their tables) closed in May 2020, two years before the games followed them out of the company.

In November 2021 Microgaming announced the sale of its "games distribution business" and its "content portfolio", Quickfire included, to Games Global, a company created for the purpose and based, like its predecessor, on the Isle of Man. The completion was announced in May 2022 (according to the announcements of the time), and Games Global took the studios, the Mega Moolah network and the operators' contracts.

The seller renamed itself Apricot (Apricot Investments Limited) and kept the platform on which many casinos of the old network run, that is the account, the "cashier" and the lobby software, as distinct from the games; the Apricot "seal" now stands in the footers of Jackpot City, Royal Vegas and Lucky Nugget beside eCOGRA's, where we saw it in October 2026. One company has become two, one making the games and the other running the machinery behind the counter.

The games keep running, because Games Global now releases and maintains Thunderstruck, Mega Moolah, Immortal Romance and several hundred more titles from the old catalogue. The information panel of each game says "Games Global" where it said "Microgaming", while the "help" pages of older titles sometimes still carry the old name, a relic rather than a sign that two versions exist. Whoever searches today for a "Microgaming casino" finds the same games he remembers, under a new label.

The casinos keep their lobbies as well: Royal Vegas, Jackpot City, Spin Casino, Gaming Club, Platinum Play, Lucky Nugget, Ruby Fortune, All Slots and Euro Palace are the same houses with the same accounts, the same loyalty points and the same cashier. Our reviews are written for the casino rather than for the software house, and Jackpot City is the one house of the family tested with real play, by our collaborators from two Canadian markets before 2025, as our Jackpot City review tells.

The licence does not change with the software house, because a licence belongs to the operator and is granted by a regulator (the Malta Gaming Authority, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission or iGaming Ontario for the houses above, according to the version served to each market). Neither Games Global nor Apricot stands behind your withdrawal. When a house does not pay, the complaint goes to the regulator named in its footer, which is worth reading before the lobby, and before you deposit.

The label "Microgaming" tells a player which games he will find in a lobby, and nothing else, since a casino can carry the Games Global catalogue under a licence from Malta or under a permit from Curaçao, with terms that pay a withdrawal in two days or in two months. A house of the old family earns no credit for its past!

The habits of the old network remain the right ones: the demo before the first stake, the RTP read in the information panel, the terms read before the bonus (above all the "wagering", the bets required before a withdrawal), and the licence looked up on the regulator's "register". Our top 10 applies the same filters to every house, whatever its software, and the slot reviews say which titles we found worth an evening in demo.

The cards above show the houses of the family that we work with, and their offers are the operators' published ones at the time of writing (October 2026), which change; the terms on each casino's own page prevail over any figure printed here. Where a card disagrees with the operator's page, the operator's page is right, whatever the software behind it.