Aviamasters' first year in numbers

The quiet half of year one

Aviamasters released on 2 July 2024 as one of five BGaming titles that month, with limited lobby visibility and almost no press attention. For roughly six months it stayed that way. Whatever the anniversary numbers ended up looking like, the first half of the game's first year produced none of them.

The inflection came around the turn of 2025, and it came from outside the company. Players found the game, affiliates followed, streamers amplified it, and the automatic landing — a round you cannot cash out of, that resolves in front of you either way — turned out to be unusually good television. By the time BGaming marked the first anniversary in mid-2025, it had a set of figures worth publishing.

The headline figures

Everything below comes from BGaming — its anniversary press release (opens in a new tab), its official game page, and an opinion piece it authored for the trade press. Note the reporting windows in the third column; they matter, and we come back to them.

Two of those rows are the ones actually worth dwelling on, and neither is the biggest percentage.

Why 200 videos a day is the real number

Five hundred million views is the figure that gets quoted, but views can be bought. Two hundred new videos a day cannot — not at that sustained volume, and not from creators who are mostly not being paid. That figure is a measure of how many people independently decided the game was worth filming, which is a much harder thing to manufacture than reach.

BGaming's own explanation is that the design happens to be built for clips. The visual maths is legible to someone who has never gambled: the plane climbs when it collects, dives when it is hit, and either reaches the ship or does not. There is no cash-out decision to explain and no strategy to narrate. Game producer Vasili Pauliuchenka put it in terms of nerves rather than mechanics — the game is fast, unpredictable, and refuses the step-by-step structure most gambling titles use, and that “raw, real-time feeling is probably why it caught on so well on TikTok and with streamers.”

There is a less romantic factor too, and to its credit BGaming has been open about it: because Aviamasters looks like a casual mobile game rather than a casino product, ad filters and content platforms rarely blocked it. That made it unusually easy for creators and affiliates to distribute — an advantage its CMO Kate Puteiko has said the studio did not initially recognise as a strategic one.

The number BGaming cares about

The 12.27% figure arrived later than the anniversary press, and it is the one that reframes everything else. Across the whole of 2025, Aviamasters accounted for 12.27% of BGaming's total gross gaming revenue — roughly an eighth of a studio with a catalogue then approaching 250 certified games.

More pointedly, BGaming says it outperformed Bonanza Billion and Snoop Dogg Dollars (opens in a new tab) as a customer-acquisition title. Those are flagship slots with licensing budgets behind them. A casual game with no bonus round, no free spins and a ×250 cap beat both, and it did so largely on distribution it did not pay for. That is the finding that explains every subsequent decision: the branded reskins, the Christmas edition, the sequel, the community events.

BGaming's CMO Kate Puteiko framed the anniversary in those terms rather than in views: the game, she said, had “helped establish BGaming as a leading voice in the casual gaming space” and “helped our partners attract millions of customers.” The audience for these numbers was never really players. It was operators and affiliates.

Read the windows carefully

Which brings us to the third column of that table. Every figure here is self-reported, unaudited marketing material, and the reporting periods do not line up — in places they contradict each other outright.

New player growth is quoted at +740% over five months in the anniversary release and at +1,213% over “the last 6 months” on the game page, with a later BGaming post citing +335% over five months and a 13.1% average weekly increase. Those are three different numbers for what sounds like the same metric, because the windows are floating and never dated. Separately, +740% appears in one BGaming post as social-mention growth rather than player growth, which suggests the figure has been repeated loosely enough that at least one of its attributions is wrong.

None of this means the numbers are invented. Percentages that large are what genuinely happens when a product goes from a standing start, and the direction of travel is corroborated by things harder to fake — Stake.com promoting it organically, multiple operators commissioning branded versions, a SiGMA Central Europe award. But a percentage without a baseline is not a measurement, and 12.27% of GGR is the only figure in the whole set with a fixed denominator and a stated period.

What the first year actually proved

Strip out the percentages and one durable finding remains: a game that spent six months going nowhere became its studio's biggest acquisition title without a marketing push, because it was easier to film than to explain. BGaming has since said the community guides the game's ongoing development, which is a fairly extraordinary admission for a provider — the roadmap came from the clips.

That is also the honest context for everything that followed. The sequel exists because the first year worked, and it was built with input from the streamers who made it work. If you want the practical version of what changed between them, our comparison of Aviamasters and Aviamasters 2 covers it.

All performance figures in this article are as published by BGaming and have not been independently verified. Aviamasters is a real-money gambling product for players aged 18 or over — commercial success is not an indicator of player returns. Please gamble responsibly.