Ksenia Vasilevskaya, Royal Partners: “Everytime we meet new parterns, our main goal is to build that relationship so everyone is comfortable”
Shows & conferences - 23 October, 2025
At SBC Summit Lisbon 2025, Focus Gaming News sat down with Ksenia Vasilevskaya, Affiliate Team Lead at Royal Partners, to discuss the team’s relationship-first approach, in-house brand strategy, evolving traffic mix, and how influencer marketing is reshaping affiliate programmes.
Vasilevskaya emphasised that Royal Partners’ reputation is built on long-term partner care and personalisation. “Our main goal is to build that relationship so everyone is comfortable,” she said, noting that affiliate managers are matched thoughtfully because “people are different,” and that the team keeps “tight contact” with partners—sometimes becoming “even friends.”
Royal Partners operates exclusively with in-house brands, which Vasilevskaya framed as a key advantage. “We do everything on our side—payments, retention and many, many more things,” she explained. This vertical control lets the team share actionable know-how with affiliates: “We know our brands, we know how to work with them… what to do to get a better conversion, better checks, maybe better deposit sums.” She also confirmed the programme’s commercial flexibility: “We are very flexible… we are happy to share more if players are great, if value is great and we want to scale up—why not?”
On the show floor at Lisbon, the team was focused on growth and market intelligence. Vasilevskaya described the event as “very fruitful, very busy,” with meetings spanning new affiliates, long-standing partners, and competitors—crucial to “see who does what, where the market is going… and go the way maybe even faster than other competitors.”
A standout theme was the rise of streaming and influencer-driven traffic. “We even have a separate department which works with influencers only,” she said, stressing the need for a specialised approach: streamers are “a different type of affiliate… they’re celebrities, they want to be treated like a celebrity,” and “to squeeze all of the traffic, you need a very strong strategy of working with streamers.”
Turning to paid media, Vasilevskaya was candid about headwinds. “This is my pain,” she admitted of Google PPC, citing January 2024 as an inflexion point when “Google started to do their dirty thing.” Since then, costs have surged: “The prices are high… you can find [traffic], but it will be still very, very, very expensive.” As a result, teams are “switching to different types of traffic… basically Facebook, in-app or other interesting sources,” while testing funnels that deliver quality.
On social platforms, she pushed back on the idea that policies have simply relaxed. “It didn’t become any easier,” she said. Instead, what’s changed is the craft: “The content became better… more entertaining,” aligning with the industry’s core proposition—“at the end of the day you’re in entertainment.”
Vasilevskaya also highlighted a recent in-house launch, the “Martin” project, noting strong early traction: “We launched it a few months ago… Martin is really, really [performing]. He’s cute… he’s attractive—like the company, Royal Partners.”
Across the conversation, the through-line was consistent: relationship depth, in-house control, commercial agility and a modern media mix. As Vasilevskaya summed up, the priority is human as much as it is commercial—understanding partners, sharing operational expertise and adapting quickly to keep performance climbing.