Portfolio Pruning: How to Retire the Games Nobody Plays

Retention · 2026-07-20 · 9 min read · By CROCO Games

Around 40% of the games a casino surfaces on its shelves never reach a prominent position. A practical audit for deciding what to cut, what to re-merchandise, and what to keep.

Every casino lobby accumulates a graveyard. Titles taken on because a bundle required it, because a BDM was persuasive, because a market launch needed volume — and then never touched again. They cost integration effort, certification budget per market, QA time on every platform release, and something harder to measure: they make the lobby worse for the games you actually want people to play.

This is a practical guide to pruning that graveyard without cutting the wrong things — and the wrong things get cut constantly, because the metric everyone reaches for first is the one most likely to mislead.

The scale of the problem, measured

In a lobby-tracking dataset covering 693 casino brands across 44 markets (May–July 2026, weighted toward European lobbies), the median brand surfaces 216 distinct games across its tracked shelf sections. Of those, 58.7% ever reach a top-ten position and 88% ever reach a top-thirty position. So roughly four games in ten spend the entire observation period without ever appearing near the front of a shelf.

Zoom out to the whole tracked universe and the tail is starker still: of 14,309 games observed across all these lobbies, 54.2% appear on exactly one brand, and just 62 titles reach 100 brands or more. The industry produces vastly more content than lobbies can merchandise, and most of it lives permanently in the basement.

The trap: dead versus never shown

Here is the mistake that ruins most pruning exercises. You pull rounds-per-game for the last 90 days, sort ascending, and cut the bottom. What you have actually done is cut the games your merchandising never exposed — which is not the same as the games players rejected.

Exposure is wildly unequal, and it is also persistent: as we found when measuring shelf stickiness, roughly half of a lobby's top ten is unchanged six weeks later. A game that never got a position never got a chance, so its zero is a statement about your lobby, not about the game.

So every metric in a pruning audit has to be exposure-adjusted. The question is never "how many rounds did this game generate?" but "how many rounds did it generate per impression, per session in which it was visible, per day it held a position?" A title with 300 rounds from 40,000 impressions is genuinely dead. A title with 300 rounds from 400 impressions is a merchandising decision waiting to be made.

There is a behavioural reason exposure matters so much. Graydon's 2018 experiment let players choose freely among four slots crossing payback percentage with the presence of losses-disguised-as-wins, and found that LDW presence shifted which game players picked, independently of payback — the first clean demonstration that surface-level generosity signals drive game selection, not just in-game feeling. Players choose on what they can see before they play: name, art, badge, position. If your lobby buries a title, its actual quality never enters the decision.

The audit, in five passes

Pass 1 — Segment by exposure, not performance. Split the catalogue into three buckets: prominently merchandised (held a top-30 position), listed but rarely surfaced, and effectively invisible (search-only). Judge each bucket separately; comparing across them is comparing incomparable things.

Pass 2 — Score the merchandised bucket on real performance. For games that did get exposure, use per-exposure metrics: unique players per 1,000 impressions, rounds per session in which the game was visible, and 7-day return rate for players whose first session included it. These are the games where a low score is a real verdict. Our KPI guide covers the definitions in detail.

Pass 3 — Test the invisible bucket before judging it. Take a sample of never-surfaced titles and give each a fixed exposure window in a defined row — a themed shelf, a challenger slot, a tournament. Two to four weeks is usually enough to separate "nobody wants this" from "nobody saw this." Run it as a proper test, per the lobby A/B testing guide.

Pass 4 — Apply the non-performance filters. Some games should go regardless of numbers: titles not certified for a market you now operate in, titles whose provider has stopped maintaining the build, titles that fail your current mobile or accessibility bar, and duplicates — near-identical math and theme from the same studio, where one clearly outperforms.

Pass 5 — Check the contract before cutting. Minimum guarantees, exclusivity terms and bundled catalogue clauses can make removal expensive or contractually impossible. This is where an honest read of commercial terms pays for itself.

Why a smaller lobby usually performs better

The instinct to hoard content is understandable — more titles looks like more choice, and aggregator deals make adding games nearly frictionless. But every additional title dilutes three finite resources: shelf positions, search relevance, and the attention a player spends before deciding. A lobby with 2,000 games and 40 merchandised positions is not offering choice; it is offering 40 choices plus a search box and a very long scroll.

Cutting the graveyard also improves the things you cannot see on a dashboard: category filters return relevant results, thumbnail grids stop looking like clip art, and the games team can actually hold the portfolio in their heads when planning a promotion. See our content saturation strategy for the broader argument.

Retire gracefully, not abruptly

A removed game can still have active players, unfinished bonus rounds, tournament entries and free-round grants attached to it. Before removal: stop granting free rounds on the title, let outstanding grants expire or migrate them, check for in-progress feature states, remove it from CRM segments and landing pages, and keep round history queryable for the retention period your licence requires. Then remove it from the lobby, and only later from the integration.

A quarterly rhythm works well for most operators — a pruning pass alongside the placement audit, so removals and promotions are decided together rather than in separate meetings that never quite meet.

Frequently asked questions

How many games should a casino lobby have?

There is no universal number, but the constraint that matters is merchandising capacity, not catalogue size. If you have 40 prominent positions and thousands of titles, most of the catalogue is invisible inventory. Track the ratio of surfaced to listed games rather than the raw count.

How do you know if a slot is underperforming or just badly placed?

Use exposure-adjusted metrics. Rounds per impression, unique players per 1,000 impressions and return rate for players whose first session included the game separate genuine rejection from lack of visibility. Raw round counts mostly measure past merchandising.

Does removing games from a casino lobby hurt revenue?

Rarely, if you remove titles that were never merchandised — they contribute little and dilute shelf space, search results and player attention. The risk lies in removing games with small but loyal audiences, which exposure-adjusted retention metrics will identify before you cut.

How often should an operator prune the game portfolio?

A quarterly pass suits most operators, ideally run together with the shelf placement audit so that removals and promotions are decided in the same conversation rather than separately.

Key takeaways

• The median tracked brand surfaces 216 games on its shelves and only 58.7% of them ever reach a top-ten position — roughly four in ten never appear near the front.
• Never judge a title on raw rounds: exposure is unequal and persistent, so unadjusted metrics mostly measure your own merchandising history.
• Experimental work shows visible surface signals drive which game players select, so a buried title's quality never enters the decision.
• Run five passes: segment by exposure, score the merchandised, test the invisible, apply compliance and duplication filters, then check contracts.
• Retire gracefully — free rounds, bonus states, CRM segments and round history all need handling before a title disappears.

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