Nina Jelen on BlueOcean Gaming’s Next GameHub Chapter and SBC Lisbon

Nina Jelen, CCO at BlueOcean Gaming, joins us in this discussion as the company enters the next stage of its 2026 growth. BlueOcean has continued expanding GameHub’s content network through a series of new partnerships while developing a broader portfolio of tools and solutions for operators. With the company returning to SBC Summit Lisbon and shortlisted for White Label Supplier of the Year at the SBC Awards 2026, its focus is increasingly extending beyond aggregation into engagement, personalisation and new market opportunities.

In this CasinoRank interview, Jelen discusses BlueOcean Gaming’s recent growth, its evolving GameHub strategy and the new products it will bring to SBC Summit Lisbon. She also explores Ride Along, Lucky Wheel and Sweepstakes, the role of recommendation technology in improving content discovery, and why creating more value around existing game portfolios is becoming central to BlueOcean’s next phase.

You’ve signed four major content partnerships since April — SA Gaming, ENJOY, ICONIC21, and Black Lagoon Games. What’s driving that pace, and which of those deals do you see having the biggest impact on GameHub’s positioning going forward? 

Nina Jelen: For us, it’s not really about signing providers for the sake of increasing the number in the GameHub portfolio. At this stage, having a huge catalogue is almost expected from an established aggregator.

We’re much more selective about where a provider strengthens our offering — whether that’s a particular market, a different type of content, or simply something our operators are actively asking us for.

These four partnerships are good examples because they bring different strengths to GameHub. SA Gaming is particularly interesting because of its strong live casino presence and recognition in Asian markets, while ENJOY, ICONIC21 and Black Lagoon add further variety to the portfolio and help us respond to different operator and player preferences.

From my commercial perspective, that’s what matters most. I want us to have the right content for the markets and operators we’re serving.

And increasingly, we’re involving our clients directly in those decisions. We regularly look at requests and market demand when prioritising which providers should come next.

You’re back at SBC Summit Lisbon this year. What’s different about BlueOcean’s presence this time around, and can attendees expect any announcements or new initiatives timed around the show? 

Nina Jelen: Lisbon is going to be a particularly exciting show for us because this year we have much more new product development to actually demonstrate, rather than simply talk about what’s coming next.

One of the biggest highlights will definitely be Ride Along, which is probably our most exciting product release this year. It brings streamers and players into the same gaming experience, allowing players to bet alongside a streamer rather than simply watching them play.

We’ll also be presenting Lucky Wheel, our latest GameHub promotional tool, as well as the continued evolution of GameHub 2.0.

And another major focus for us will be Sweepstakes. That’s a completely new vertical for BlueOcean, and we’re now able to support the market both through GameHub aggregation and through our dedicated Sweepstakes platform, offering a Turnkey Sweepstake solution. 

So I’d say the biggest difference this year is that visitors will see several different sides of where BlueOcean is heading: aggregation, engagement, social gaming, AI and new markets.

BlueOcean is shortlisted for White Label Supplier of the Year at the SBC Awards 2026, competing in a category with several established names in the space. What do you think genuinely sets BlueOcean apart, and what do you believe gives you the edge in that comparison? 

Nina Jelen: I think one of our biggest strengths is that we’ve actually been doing this for a very long time.

BlueOcean started with White Label and platform solutions, so we’re not approaching this as a new product category. We’ve spent 16 years working with operators, launching brands, entering different markets and learning what operators actually need once a casino goes live.

And that last part is important. Launching the casino is only the beginning.

Operators need content, payments, CRM, reporting, promotions, design, player engagement, technical support and people who can help them solve problems when something unexpected happens.

Because we also have GameHub and now our wider ecosystem of tools and services, we’re able to bring a lot of those pieces together.

But I also think our size works in our favour. We’re established enough to have the technology, integrations and experience behind us, while still being flexible enough to listen to an individual client and adapt.

For me, being shortlisted alongside some of the biggest names in the industry is already a strong recognition of what our team has built.

Looking at BlueOcean’s product portfolio, which products have been most instrumental to the company’s growth, and what drove the success of Fuel Jackpot and an innovative type of jackpot like Armageddon?  

Nina Jelen: Historically, our Platform solution created the foundation of the company, while GameHub has been the biggest driver of our expansion over the last several years.

What’s interesting now is that growth is increasingly coming from the ecosystem we’re building around those core products.

Fuel Jackpot is a good example. It’s a promotional feature that lets operators layer jackpot excitement across their existing casino offering, and Armageddon Jackpots was released alongside it as one of the jackpot types within that tool — a classic jackpot with a twist.

Together they showed us that operators don’t just want access to games — they want mechanics that give players another reason to engage with those games, and tools that are easy to deploy across a catalogue rather than built one-off.

And that thinking now extends beyond jackpots. Drops, Leaderboards, Lucky Wheel, Ride Along, Recommendation Engine — they all address the same commercial question:

Once an operator has thousands of games, how do we help them get more value out of them?

That’s becoming an increasingly important part of our product strategy.

BlueOcean introduced earlier this year its AI-driven Recommendation Engine to GameHub. What drove the development, and what impact do you expect it to have on player engagement and retention? 

Nina Jelen: The starting point was actually a very simple problem: choice has become overwhelming.

An operator can have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of games in the lobby. That’s great from a content perspective, but a player is only going to interact with a very small percentage of them.

So the question becomes less about how much content you have and more about whether you’re showing the right content to the right player. That’s where the Recommendation Engine comes in.

Instead of every player seeing essentially the same lobby, we’re using player behaviour and patterns across game activity to help surface content that is more relevant to the individual player.

From a commercial perspective, I think the opportunity is significant. Better discovery can mean players finding games they genuinely enjoy faster, more exposure for relevant content that might otherwise disappear deep inside the lobby, and ultimately stronger engagement and retention.

But I see this as only the first step.

The really exciting part will come when recommendation technology starts working together with promotional tools. Imagine not only identifying which game a player is likely to enjoy, but also understanding when that player should receive a relevant promotion, enter a leaderboard, receive a Drop or be presented with another engagement mechanic.

That’s when AI starts moving from simply recommending content to helping operators orchestrate the player experience.

Finally, where do you see the next big opportunity for BlueOcean Gaming — expanding GameHub’s content network, developing new tools, or reaching new markets? 

Nina Jelen: I don’t think it’s going to be just one of those three. The opportunity is really in connecting them. Of course we’ll continue expanding GameHub’s content network, but as I mentioned earlier, I don’t think simply adding another thousand games creates the same competitive advantage it once did.

For me, one of the biggest opportunities is what happens around the content.

We’re investing heavily in tools that help operators promote, personalise and create more engagement around their games. Ride Along is a good example because it introduces a completely different social layer to casino gaming. Recommendation technology is another because it addresses content discovery. And we’ll continue introducing new GameHub tools in that direction.

At the same time, new markets are a major part of our growth strategy.

Sweepstakes is one of the clearest examples. We entered a completely new vertical and can now approach it both as an aggregator and as a platform provider. Sweepstakes is its own platform proposition, but closely tied to GameHub — not a side experiment. We’re also continuing to prepare GameHub technically for more locally regulated markets through GameHub 2.0.

So if I had to summarise where I see the opportunity, I’d say: more markets, smarter technology and much more value around the content we already aggregate.

That’s where I believe the next stage of BlueOcean’s growth will come from.