Announcement: on 6 October 2022, GameArt strengthened its cooperation with Octavian Lab and went live on 1xbet.it through the Casino Hub.
Certification: just under 100 GameArt games were certified for Italy at the time, up from 65 in November 2020.
Showcase: twelve titles were highlighted, including African Sunset, Royal Gems, Wolf Hunt and Money Farm 2.
Aggregator: the Casino Hub connects operators and providers through a single integration and claimed more than 80 providers in June 2025.
Octavian Lab: a Rome-based company in the Octavian group, which also develops the AGP, a player account management platform.
Clients: in 2024, Octavian was described as the technology supplier behind Eurobet, Snaitech, Sisal and Betfair.
Closure: 1xbet.it stopped operating in Italy on 10 November 2025, with no official reason given.
Reform: since 13 November 2025, Italy has had 52 concessions for 46 operators, with a single domain per concessionaire.
Market: spending on Italian online casino games reached €3.2 billion in 2025, up 15.8%.
What's next: GameArt signed with Casino di Venezia and Vincitù in 2026 and is exhibiting at SiGMA World Rome from 3 to 5 November 2026.
Outside Italy: ADM-licensed sites only serve players located in Italy, so players elsewhere should look for an operator licensed in their own country.
Octavian Lab: the Roman road that carried GameArt slots to 1xbet.it
On 6 October 2022, GameArt announced a new outlet in Italy, and the road it took to get there mattered as much as the destination. Its slots were going live on 1xbet.it, the Italian version of the 1xBet brand, through the Casino Hub, an aggregator run by a Rome-based company still little known to the public: Octavian Lab. The studio said that just under 100 of its games were certified for Italy at the time, enough to stock an operator's shelves generously. Since then, the game has gone on without 1xbet.it, and GameArt has moved its pieces all the way to a Naples-based concessionaire whose arrival was announced in September 2026.
Rereading the press release today feels a little like finding an old membership card at the back of a drawer. The casino's name is still printed on it, but the gaming room has turned off its lights. On 10 November 2025, three days before Italy's new concessions came into force, 1xbet.it shut down its operations. The aggregator, meanwhile, kept growing.
I chose to read this deal backwards, from 2026, because that is where it becomes instructive. What exactly does a casino game aggregator do? What does the label “certified for Italy” really guarantee? And what is left of a partnership once the operator leaves the table? The answers lie in official press releases and in the Italian trade press, each dated one by one. In iGaming, a figure without a date is worth about as much as a ticket without a draw.
October 2022: what GameArt actually announced
The text runs to just a few paragraphs. In it, GameArt explains that it is strengthening its cooperation with Octavian Lab, described as a technology and services provider for betting and gaming in regulated markets, in Italy and internationally. The vehicle for this cooperation carries a no-nonsense name, the Casino Hub Aggregator. The only client mentioned is 1xbet.it, which adds the studio's slots to its Italian offering. The key figure appears in black and white in GameArt's press release of 6 October 2022: just under 100 games certified for the Italian market.
Two voices accompany the announcement. Andres Galan Chillon, Sales Manager at Octavian Lab, sums up the deal in one sentence: “Octavian Lab and GameArt are having a fruitful partnership thanks to our Casino Hub Aggregator.” Above all, he sees it as a chance for 1xbet.it to expand its product range in Italy. Dea Kravos, Account Manager at GameArt, says: “We are very proud to announce this new partnership.” She also slips in a detail worth more than a passing glance: “We've been collaborating with Octavian Lab for the past year.”
That timing takes us back to autumn 2021, when Octavian Lab was officially presenting its aggregator at the ENADA trade show in Rimini. In other words, 1xbet.it did not open the relationship between the two companies. It became its public showcase, one year later.
Twelve titles in the shop window
The release highlights twelve of the studio's most popular slots: African Sunset, Royal Gems, Wolf Hunt, Money Farm 2, Lucky Coins, Rosh Immortality Cube Megaways™, Piggy Bjorn, Summer Jam, Xtreme Hot, Nefertiti's Nile, Gold of Ra and Chili Quest. Among them you will find two Egyptian escapades, a farm, a wolf, a pig, royal gems and a Megaways™ mechanic. Each one is a card laid on the table to win over Italian players, who have a strong attachment to slot machines.
Two of these titles alone tell the story of the patience the Italian market demands. Lucky Coins and Wolf Hunt were among the nine games GameArt had certified for Italy in November 2020, a batch that came on top of 56 titles already approved in the country. The counter therefore went from 65 to just under 100 in two years. That makes around thirty more games certified for Italy, each one reviewed separately.
What is Octavian Lab's Casino Hub?
The Casino Hub is a casino game aggregator: a single technical integration gives an operator access to games from many providers, and gives each provider access to every operator connected to the platform. Picture a dealer's shoe in which the cards of dozens of studios have been shuffled together. The operator draws whatever it wants, without negotiating or plugging in each deck one by one.
The tool is not exactly new. Octavian Lab presented it at the ENADA show in Rimini in autumn 2021, with more than 15 providers in its portfolio and around ten more planned within the year. The company's website now spells it as one word, HubCasino, and describes it as an aggregator connected both to its own platform and to third-party platforms.
Growth followed. In June 2025, when TaDa Gaming came on board, Focus Gaming News credited it with more than 80 providers available through a single integration. The same article mentioned Blackbox, a communication protocol designed to support the 2025 to 2027 compliance drive led by the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli (ADM), Italy's gambling regulator.
For a studio like GameArt, the appeal is obvious. A game certified for Italy and integrated into the hub becomes available to connected Italian operators, who are then free to add it to their game library or not. The studio has in fact multiplied these gateways, and in August 2023 it expanded its partnership with the Bragg Gaming aggregator with the Netherlands, Spain and Croatia in its sights. Every coin has two sides, though. The middleman takes its cut, and when an operator closes, the studio has no say in the decision.
Aggregator and player account platform: two different jobs
Octavian Lab does not only sell aggregation. Its other flagship product, the AGP (Accounting Gaming Platform), belongs to a different family: player account management platforms, which the industry calls PAM. In 2021, the company described it as multi-regulator, multi-licence, multi-skin, multi-currency and multilingual. Its website now presents it as a gaming account management tool with built-in marketing campaign features.
To stay with the casino floor image, the hub deals the cards and the AGP runs the cashier's cage. As for the multi-skin selling point, it carried real weight in Italy in 2021. The 2025 reform has made it sound almost nostalgic.
Octavian Lab: who is behind the Roman aggregator?
Octavian Lab is a Rome-based company that designs technology and services for regulated gambling operators, in Italy and internationally. Let's start with its address, which is bound to raise a smile. The Octavian Lab website places the company at 197 Via Appia Nuova, a street named after the ancient road the Romans called the queen of roads. It is hard to imagine a better address for a builder of digital gateways, especially since the company's name recalls Octavian, the future emperor Augustus.
Octavian Lab S.r.l. belongs to the Octavian group, which splits its activities across several companies. Octavian Gaming covers land-based and digital games, while Octavian Digital handles online gaming solutions. Octavian Lab presents itself as the group's “engine of innovation and development”. Its website highlights communication protocols described as compliant with ADM requirements, along with ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certifications.
Its real weight shows up somewhere other than its homepage. When Octavian Lab signed with the studio Peter & Sons in November 2024, Gaming Intelligence described Octavian as the Rome-based provider whose technology powers Eurobet, Snaitech, Sisal and Betfair, among others. Emanuele Nocentelli, CEO of Octavian Lab, said at the time: “Our platform powers some of the biggest names in Italian gaming.”
In my view, this is the real story behind the 2022 announcement. 1xbet.it was only a client, whereas Octavian Lab is one of those discreet pieces of infrastructure through which part of Italian online gaming flows. Players never see these companies. They see the operator's logo and the logo on the slot. Yet when an operator disappears, it is often the plumbing that stays.
Octavian Lab in five dates
Date
Milestone
Autumn 2021
Official presentation of the Casino Hub at the ENADA show in Rimini, with more than 15 providers
6 October 2022
GameArt announces its slots on 1xbet.it via the Casino Hub
21 November 2024
Deal with Peter & Sons; Octavian is described as the supplier of Eurobet, Snaitech, Sisal and Betfair
23 June 2025
TaDa Gaming joins; the hub claims more than 80 providers
November 2026
SiGMA World Rome appears on the event calendar shown by the company
What does “certified for Italy” mean for a slot?
In Italy, an online casino game cannot be offered to players on its developer's word alone. It must first be examined by an accredited testing laboratory, then approved by the ADM. ADM certification covers how the game works: random outcomes, rules, and a return to player that matches what is declared.
The process is repeated title by title and market by market, which weighs on a studio's choices. For a Slovenian-Maltese provider targeting several regulated countries at once, each national certification works like an entry fee paid game after game. That is why a studio's Italian collection is almost always shorter than its global catalogue. It is also why the jump from 65 to nearly 100 titles between 2020 and 2022 reflects a genuine effort.
For players, one misunderstanding comes up often. A certified game is not a more generous game, nor a more entertaining one. It is a game whose mechanics have been checked and which runs within a supervised framework. Certification says nothing about volatility, about how much fun you will have or about whether a bonus is worth claiming. It answers one essential question: does the machine actually do what it says?
No more bets for 1xbet.it: what happened in November 2025?
On 10 November 2025, 1xbet.it stopped operating in Italy. The announcement appeared on the site itself, along with a closure procedure reported by Agipronews on 12 November. The operator undertook to process balance withdrawals for accounts whose identity and IBAN had been verified. Holders of incomplete accounts had until 12 December 2025 to contact customer support, with a bank statement and proof of identity.
No official reason was given. When Il Fatto Quotidiano asked, the company replied that it does not comment on matters concerning specific markets. The timing invites a connection, without proving one.
On 13 November 2025, Italy switched to its new concession regime, set out in Legislative Decree 41/2024. On the eve of the switch, SiGMA counted 52 concessions for 46 operators, €364 million collected by the State, a single gaming domain per concessionaire and around 350 skins set to disappear or change shape. The deck had been completely reshuffled.
1xBet was not the only one to pack its bags, as SBC News points out. Betway and Unibet also chose not to renew their concessions, while more than 300 domains ended up consolidated into 46 fully operational concessions in December 2025.
The 1xBet case still stands out, as the same Il Fatto Quotidiano article noted. The brand remains associated with Serie A abroad until 2027, even though it is hidden on Italian screens. The arrangement runs through the intermediary TGI Sports, which buys the league's betting package and resells it to the brand of its choice. Meanwhile, the ADM's list of blocked sites includes 134 domains linked to 1xBet. A brand that has left Italy's legal market yet remains around the pitch when seen from abroad: I will let you judge how consistent that is.
What the reform changed for players in Italy
The clearest rule is the single domain rule. Since 13 November 2025, each concession corresponds to one website linked to the company holding it, and the days when a single concession carried dozens of skins are over. The domain name in your browser and the concession number in the footer should therefore tell the same story as the ADM's public register.
The other lesson comes from the blacklist. A well-known brand can operate legally on a “.it” address and still be blocked on dozens of “.com” addresses, as the 134 domains linked to 1xBet show. The transition period ran until 14 May 2026. It gave operators time to migrate and to strengthen identity checks, spending limits and self-protection tools.
GameArt in Italy after 1xbet.it: is the game still on?
The departure of 1xbet.it did not cool the studio's ambitions. In 2026, GameArt announced its arrival on the online platform of Casino di Venezia in May, then at Vincitù in September. Vincitù accounted for 0.85% of player spending on Italian online casino games in September 2026, far behind Lottomatica and its 31.30%, according to the monthly ranking from Italian Gaming News. That month, total spending (stakes minus winnings paid out) reached €306.3 million, up 12% year on year. Across 2025, the same indicator reached €3.2 billion, up 15.8% according to SBC News, and slots made up around 65% of casino spending in December alone.
Should we cheer without reservation? I'm torn. The market is growing, regulation is tightening, and mid-sized studios now face fewer but more powerful operators. Against that backdrop, signing deals with regional concessionaires looks like a patient strategy, built on small repeated bets rather than a single all-in. That has been the common thread of online casino news in Italy since the reform, with consolidation on one side and targeted alliances on the other.
The next meeting point is Rome, once again. GameArt is exhibiting at SiGMA World Rome 2026 from 3 to 5 November at Fiera Roma (stand H6-6022). Jennifer Meli will be there as Account Manager for the Italian market, and visitors can try Baccarat Dragon Blaze ahead of its 24 November release. Octavian Lab lists the same show on its event calendar. A fitting symmetry for a story that began near a Roman road.
And for players outside Italy?
One last point for readers discovering these names from outside Italy. Sites operating under an ADM concession are reserved for players located in Italy. Elsewhere, the legal status of online casino games depends entirely on where you live. Some countries license them, others keep them under a state monopoly, and some ban them outright. Before depositing anywhere, check that the operator holds a licence issued by your own country's regulator and look it up in that regulator's public register. A licence granted in another country does not automatically make a site legal where you live.
FAQs: Octavian Lab and GameArt in Italy
What is Octavian Lab?
Octavian Lab S.r.l. is a Rome-based company in the Octavian group that supplies technology and services to regulated gambling operators. It develops the Casino Hub, a game aggregator, and the AGP, a player account management platform.
What is Octavian Lab's Casino Hub used for?
The Casino Hub, now spelled HubCasino, connects game providers and operators through a single technical integration. It had more than 15 providers when it was presented in autumn 2021, and more than 80 in June 2025.
How many GameArt games were certified for Italy in 2022?
Just under 100, according to GameArt's press release of 6 October 2022. The studio had 65 in November 2020.
Which GameArt games were highlighted for 1xbet.it?
The press release named twelve titles: African Sunset, Royal Gems, Wolf Hunt, Money Farm 2, Lucky Coins, Rosh Immortality Cube Megaways™, Piggy Bjorn, Summer Jam, Xtreme Hot, Nefertiti's Nile, Gold of Ra and Chili Quest.
Is 1xbet.it still active in Italy?
No. 1xbet.it stopped operating in Italy on 10 November 2025, three days before the new concession regime came into force. The company gave no official reason.
What does ADM certification guarantee for a slot?
It guarantees that the game was examined by an accredited laboratory and approved by the ADM, Italy's regulator, before being offered to players in Italy. It covers how the game works, not how generous it is.
What did Italy's reform of 13 November 2025 change?
It awarded 52 concessions to 46 operators, limited each concessionaire to a single gaming domain and ended the skin system. The transition period ran until 14 May 2026.
Is GameArt still present in Italy?
Yes. In 2026, the studio announced deals with Casino di Venezia in May and with Vincitù in September, and it is exhibiting at SiGMA World Rome from 3 to 5 November 2026.
How big is the Italian online casino market?
Player spending on Italian online casino games reached €3.2 billion in 2025, up 15.8%. In September 2026 alone, it came to €306.3 million.
Can you play GameArt slots online from outside Italy?
It depends on where you live. ADM-licensed sites are reserved for players in Italy. Elsewhere, look for an operator licensed by your own country's regulator, in a country where online casino games are permitted.
