Collaboration Between Game Providers And Affiliates, In The Context Of Game Development

Mykhailo Kachanov, also known as Misha Kachanov, is currently the Chief Business Officer at SlotCatalog. With over five years of experience in the iGaming and affiliate marketing industry, he worked with top-tier partners, scaled traffic across multiple markets, and built affiliate teams from the ground up.

SlotCatalog is a rapidly growing internet platform for casino players, operators and game developers. Our main goal is to become the most competent online slots game catalog and to supply objective and up to date slots game analytics for the gambling industry. 

Starting as a content manager in 2020, Kachanov has been with SlotCatalog for over six years. During his tenure, he has managed the brand’s industry partnerships, including fostering a game launch collaboration with Evoplay in June 2025. In his role, Kachanov drives the affiliate’s business strategy, grows partnerships with game providers and operators, scales revenue and ensures product value aligns with the industry. 

Interview with Mykhailo Kachanov - The Chief Business Officer at SlotCatalog

For years, the conversation between game studios and their affiliate partners was largely transactional. But what can happen when that relationship becomes a two-way street of shared data and collaborative development? 

In this interview for LUCKLANDIA, Misha explores a revolutionary new model for iGaming collaboration between affiliates and providers. He discovered how the shared insights led to a more informed game design, setting a new standard for how to build products that succeed in a competitive market.

Q: What inspired this type of collaboration, and what do you think it says about how the role of affiliates is evolving in the iGaming ecosystem?

Misha: The inspiration came from a simple observation: affiliates sit on top of enormous amounts of player behaviour data — what themes convert, which mechanics retain, how different GEOs respond to specific game features — and almost none of that was flowing back to the studios building the games. That felt like a missed opportunity on both sides. What this says about the affiliate role is that we're no longer just a distribution layer. 

The affiliate's position in the funnel — between the player and the product — gives us a unique vantage point that studios don't have direct access to. The evolution I see is affiliates moving from traffic vendors to strategic intelligence partners. The ones who embrace that shift will have far more durable relationships with providers.

Q: From your perspective as a head of affiliates and business development, how do partnerships like this help you rethink how success is measured, beyond just game performance metrics? 

Misha: It pushes you to think in longer cycles. Traditional affiliate metrics — FTDs, conversion rates, CPA payouts — are all backward-looking. They tell you what happened. Collaborative development asks a different question: what should happen, and why?

With CrossyRun™, success started to include things like: Did the mechanic land in the markets our data predicted? Did the player segments we identified actually respond the way we expected? Are studios coming back to build the next game in the framework? That last one matters. When a studio wants to build a second CrossyRun™ title, that's the real performance metric. It means the first one worked — not just commercially, but as a proof of concept for a new kind of partnership.

Q: Historically, affiliates have been focused on traffic and conversion. What made you want to step closer to actual content creation? 

Misha: It was a logical extension of what we already do. SlotCatalog tracks thousands of games across global casino lobbies, monitors SlotRank in real time, and analyses what players are actively searching for. At some point you realise that the data you're sitting on has pre-production value, not just post-launch value.

CrossyRun™ was the moment that clicked. The search trend data we were looking at wasn't just interesting — it was specific enough to design around. We knew the mechanic type, we knew the GEOs, we knew the player profiles. That's not a brief you hand to a journalist. That's a brief you hand to a game designer.

The other driver was structural. If you're just a traffic source, you're replaceable. If you're the partner who helped conceive the mechanic a studio is now building its roadmap around, that's a fundamentally different relationship — and a much more durable one.

Q: What kind of trust and communication is needed to make this kind of collaboration truly productive, and how did you build that between your teams? 

Misha: Trust here is built around two things: data transparency and clearly defined roles. The studio needs to know that the insights you're bringing are genuine — grounded in real player behaviour, not shaped by commercial interests. And the affiliate needs to know that their input is actually influencing decisions, not just being acknowledged and filed away.

Practically, it means establishing early on what each side is contributing and what they're getting in return. With CrossyRun™, our contribution was the mechanic concept and the market intelligence behind it. The studio's contribution was the technical execution and creative production. That clarity made the collaboration functional from day one.

It also means maintaining communication throughout development, not just at the brief stage. The worst version of this is sharing a data pack at kickoff and reconnecting at launch. The model that actually works involves regular touchpoints — feedback on prototypes, GEO-specific input as the game takes shape, promotional planning that starts before the build is finished. That's what turns a one-time project into an ongoing partnership.

Q: What did you learn about the developer mindset that surprised you and how might it change how you engage with games moving forward? 

Misha: The biggest surprise was how receptive studios are to structured market intelligence — when it's presented in the right way. Developers are deeply creative, but they're often building without clear visibility into how specific mechanics perform across different regions and player types. When you come in with something precise — not "crash games are popular" but "search volume for this mechanic category grew across these specific GEOs over this period, and here's the player profile behind it" — it lands immediately.

It also changes the dynamic of the conversation. You stop being a distribution partner asking for promotional assets and start being a strategic input the team actually wants in the room.

Going forward, it changes how I approach every provider conversation. I'm less interested in surface-level feature discussions and more focused on the assumptions a studio is making about their target player — and whether our data supports or challenges those assumptions. That's where the most useful dialogue happens, and that's where the next CrossyRun™ starts.

LL: Misha, thank you for your time and the valuable insights into the collaboration between affiliates and providers. We wish you success in the future!