Artur Sheikhaliev, DELULU Gaming: “Our players shouldn’t need a manual to understand why a mechanic is fun”

Artur Sheikhaliev, CEO of DELULU Gaming, discusses the company’s debut at SBC Summit Lisbon, game development philosophy, and growth strategy.

Exclusive interview.- DELULU Gaming is entering its first SBC Summit Lisbon with a growing portfolio, a distinctive approach to game design and an ambition to establish itself as a different kind of casino content provider.

In this exclusive interview with Focus Gaming News, Artur Sheikhaliev, CEO of DELULU Gaming, discusses the company’s plans for the event, the thinking behind its player-first approach to mechanics and how early performance data is shaping its roadmap. He also looks at DELULU’s priorities across Europe and the CIS, its potential expansion into Latin America and Africa, and the ambitions driving the studio through 2027.

DELULU Gaming is still a relatively new name in the market. With SBC Summit Lisbon approaching, what are your main objectives for the event, and how has the company’s position evolved since its official launch?

This is our first SBC with our own booth, and for us it’s a big moment. We want it to feel like the DELULU universe brought to life with all our bold visuals, unexpected mechanics, fearless and easy-to-follow gameplay, and many things people won’t expect from a young provider.

We’re also hosting DELULU Port of Call: Lisbon, a special C-level dinner at Bonança on September 30. We wanted to get people out of meeting-room mode for a night: Lisbon, good people, proper conversations, premium nightlife, and, of course, a little DELULU chaos. Places are limited, so if you’re joining us in Lisbon, you can request an invitation via the registration link (https://bit.ly/4doHsoB).

On the business side, we’re coming with a pretty busy agenda. We want to meet with our existing partners, hear what they’re seeing from players, talk about upcoming releases, new opportunities, and at the same time, we already have plenty of meetings lined up with our potential partners. Our roadmap is already packed with new titles every month, and there’s a lot in production right now.

So SBC is bigger for us than just showing the games. We want people to see what’s behind DELULU, how we think, how fast we’re moving, and how far we want to take it. We’re picking up speed, and we didn’t enter this market to play small.

Player choice and interaction are central to DELULU’s philosophy. How do you decide which mechanics genuinely add value to the experience and which ones would simply make a game more complicated?

Games are getting more and more complicated these days, and at some point players just don’t want to keep playing, or sometimes even give a game a try. We want to stay away from that. Our players shouldn’t need a manual to understand why a mechanic is fun. Our product team doesn’t use mechanics just to add more activity on the screen and call a game interactive. If a decision doesn’t change how the experience feels, it simply doesn’t need to be there.

We’re quite strict about simplicity. The player should understand the choice almost immediately, but still feel its impact. These can be very simple decisions, but they give players some ownership over the experience without interfering with the randomness of the outcome. And not every DELULU game needs a choice mechanic. If a game is more fun without one, we leave it out and find something else that fits the character, the story or the gameplay better. For us, it needs to be fresh enough to surprise players, but familiar enough to feel intuitive. The visual direction plays a big part in finding that balance too.

“Our product team doesn’t use mechanics just to add more activity on the screen and call a game interactive.”

Artur Sheikhaliev, CEO of DELULU Gaming.

Your debut portfolio already covers different formats, from slots to instant-win games. How are you approaching portfolio development now: expanding into more game types, or going deeper into the design philosophy that defines the DELULU brand?

Right now, we’re fully focused on slots. Millions of people play them every day, and no two players want exactly the same thing. So there’s still so much we can do with slots before we start thinking about some other game format, if any.

We’re definitely taking the DELULU design philosophy further. We see how players react to familiar characters thrown into completely unexpected situations, how the animation changes as the game plays out, and how mechanics can become part of the story and the design itself. A lot of the emotion comes from exactly that. And yes, the DELULU universe is going to get much bigger. We’re aiming for around 20 games in total by the end of 2026. The portfolio will grow, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to become more standard, safe or predictable. Quite the opposite.

Oh My Gods generated strong results during its affiliate campaign, particularly with the Zeus-versus-Thor choice. How important is early performance data in shaping the development of your next games?

It’s very important because it’s fresh data. It tells us pretty quickly what works, what players really like, and what we might want to leave for another time.

Oh My Gods is a special one for us because of how much is happening around the player’s choice. It almost feels like a little show: you’re playing, but you’re also watching your decision change the gameplay, the story and the whole mood of the game. And we’ve seen some great results from that. In one 30-day affiliate campaign, the game generated 648 FTDs, while the average session reached 19.4 minutes.

Data like this gives us a real picture of how the product performs once it’s out there. Player behaviour and preferences keep changing, so we keep watching too. There’s always something you can improve, and every result tells us a little more about what players want to see in our next games and how to keep them interested in DELULU.

“There’s always something you can improve, and every result tells us a little more about what players want to see in our next games and how to keep them interested in DELULU.”

Artur Sheikhaliev, CEO of DELULU Gaming.

You have identified Europe and the CIS as current priorities, while also looking closely at Latin America, Asia and Africa. Which of these markets do you believe could become the next major growth driver for DELULU, and what makes it attractive?

Europe and the CIS are our main focus right now. We launched our first five games there and got a really strong response from players, operators and streamers. Of course, we’re also looking at and learning about other markets, and we see a lot of potential for us in LatAm and Africa. For now, we’re exploring the landscape for both markets. Then we’ll see where it takes us. But they are definitely very interesting for us.

Looking at 2026 so far, how would you assess DELULU’s first months in the market, and what are the biggest priorities for the company for the rest of the year and into 2027?

We spent a lot of time getting ready for the launch, it took a lot from every team, but it paid off. We came into the market with 130+ operators live from day one, building the whole product at the same time. You can imagine how much work went into that.

And the first results were exactly the kind of start we wanted. Our first five games reached over 90,000 unique players and more than 20 million rounds in the first month, with Oh My Gods, MLK Voyage and Candy Chaos leading the portfolio. Now the job is to keep that pace. We want more games, more operators and a much bigger streamer presence.