Spearhead Studios: the EveryMatrix story up to Fantasma Games
Spearhead Studios: the key facts
- Founded: 2019, by the EveryMatrix group
- Studio base: Marbella, Andalusia, Spain
- Head of studio: Mathias Larsson, Managing Director
- Team origin: GiG Games, the development arm of Gaming Innovation Group
- Catalogue: roughly 48 to 50 own titles, up to 70 depending on how you count
- Average recorded RTP: 95.99%, within a range of 95.81% to 97%
- Distribution licence: MGA/B2B/201/2011, held by Everymatrix Software Limited
- Regulated markets: 14 claimed in early 2022
- Last catalogued release: Shamrock Surprise, March 2024
- End of the brand: absorbed into the Fantasma Games perimeter after October 2024
Spearhead Studios: the biography of an online casino studio, from 2019 to its absorption by Fantasma Games
Spearhead Studios is an online casino game studio founded in 2019 by the Maltese group EveryMatrix. The studio sat in Marbella, Spain, and was run by Mathias Larsson. Born from the buyout of the GiG Games team, it produced around fifty HTML5 titles certified across some fifteen regulated jurisdictions. Production stopped in March 2024. That October, EveryMatrix acquired the Swedish studio Fantasma Games, and the Spearhead brand vanished. The spearheadstudios.com domain now redirects to fantasmagames.com.
Not every online casino studio dies loudly. Some fade out like a gaming hall closing at three in the morning. The neon signs go off one by one. The chairs go up on the tables. The next day, nobody notices the name above the door has changed. Spearhead Studios belongs in that category.
Five years of existence. Around fifty games. Fifteen regulated markets won one at a time, stamp after stamp. And for a finale, an HTTP redirect serving as a headstone. There is something almost moving about an exit with no press release, no tribute, not even one last LinkedIn post.
Here is the full story, from day one to the last.
Act I: born from an inheritance, 2018 to 2019
The game came before the studio
The founding paradox of this house is simple. Its most famous title shipped before the studio itself existed. Book of Souls launched on 29 November 2018 under the GiG Games banner. That was the development arm of Gaming Innovation Group. Five reels, three rows, ten lines, a max win of 5,000x the stake. The heroine is an archaeologist called Lara Jones, a name that borrows cheerfully from two legends of adventure cinema. Nobody has ever claimed the online casino sector was subtle about naming things.
Meanwhile, EveryMatrix was eyeing the value chain with appetite. Founded in 2008 and already solid in platform and aggregation, the group had reached a simple conclusion. Distributing other people's games earns a commission. Producing your own earns a margin.
2019: the group buys a team and gives it a name
In 2019, EveryMatrix absorbed the GiG development business. It renamed the whole thing Spearhead Studios. The group's official timeline sums up the year in one administrative line. The studio extends commercial activity into game development. Translation: we bought developers, and they work for us now.
At the helm stood Mathias Larsson. A craftsman's profile rather than a financier's. He founded Xin Gaming and came up through live dealer innovation. Someone who had watched reels spin before he watched spreadsheets spin.
The team settled in Marbella, in Andalusia. Far from Malta, Gibraltar, Bucharest or Tallinn, where every other studio piles up. The choice raises an eyebrow in a sector that crams itself onto the same square kilometre of Sliema. It also makes perfect sense. Hiring a developer on the Costa del Sol costs less than in Malta. It also sells far better in a job interview. Sunshine is a salary argument few HR directors dare to put a number on.
The house doctrine in five words
The studio's philosophy fit into a phrase the group repeated across all its documentation: Local Games for Local Markets. Casino games designed market by market, built on real behavioural data. Not a global blockbuster you then try to shoehorn in everywhere.
On paper, that is smart. In practice, it was also an elegant way of saying they would never have the budget for the next planetary hit. Both readings are true at once. That is exactly what makes this story interesting.
Act II: the race for approvals, 2020 to 2022
A B2B studio is worth nothing on its games alone. It is worth the doors it can open. So these three years were less a creative adventure than an administrative marathon. Spearhead ran it fast.
The regulatory timeline
- August 2020: Romanian certification issued by the ONJN
- March 2021: Croatian certification
- 11 March 2021: the UK Gambling Commission amends the EveryMatrix licence to add Casino Host activity, opening distribution to British casinos
- 12 January 2022: Dutch certification issued by the Kansspelautoriteit
By that date, management claimed 14 regulated markets: Malta, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Romania, Croatia, the Netherlands, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Colombia and Belarus, with Germany to follow.
Fourteen jurisdictions in three years. For a studio of around thirty people, that is no small footnote. It is arguably the real achievement of Spearhead Studios. The one nobody talks about, because it produces neither artwork nor a trailer.
Spearhead becomes a pipeline as much as a workshop
By March 2021, the portfolio held 31 titles. But something more structural was happening backstage. The group's remote game server, RGS Matrix, began hosting content from third-party studios. Armadillo Studios, FunFair Games, JVL, and the Lady Luck Games titles hosted on the EveryMatrix RGS, a Scandinavian studio the group would later invest in ahead of its Nasdaq First North listing.
That shift deserves a pause. From then on, Spearhead was no longer only a creator. It was plumbing. And plumbing is easy to replace. A creator with a signature, far less so. Without knowing it, the studio had just made its own disappearance painless.
What the studio actually built
Video slots first, with a recognisable technical signature. Maximum readability. Logical triggers. Zero gratuitous complexity. Three scatters, ten free spins, one randomly drawn expanding symbol. End of explanation. You could understand any game in the catalogue within a dozen spins, and that was deliberate.
The Book of series formed the spine of the house. The Wild series ran the same mathematical engine under wildly opposing skins, from the suited trader to the nostalgic fruit machine. Then there are the oddities. Teutoburg recreates an ancient Germanic battle in a dark forest, while every competitor was churning out generic Roman spectacle. That day, someone in the Marbella office had an idea and was allowed to see it through. You wish that happened more often.
Alongside the slots came a little European roulette, some blackjack, scratch cards and instant win games. Never live casino. That was not the trade, and the group already had partners for it.
2022: SlotMatrix changes the scale and blurs the view
The launch of SlotMatrix, the in-house EveryMatrix aggregator, dropped Spearhead content into a pool of tens of thousands of games from hundreds of studios. Excellent news for distribution. Quietly catastrophic for visibility.
In a casino lobby offering 29,000 titles, a studio without a strong identity does not become popular. It becomes statistically improbable.
Act III: the glass ceiling, 2022 to 2024
Let us say it plainly, without the usual provider-page varnish. Spearhead Studios never broke through with the wider public.
The distribution numbers were perfectly respectable. Over 100 operators. Around 200 brands. Between 359 and 500 casinos depending on which industry database you trust. The content ran everywhere. Yet the average game rating stalled around 2.6 out of 5 on LCB, and that figure does not lie. Players did not dislike these games. They simply felt nothing.
The average RTP sat at 95.99%, in a range of 95.81% to 97% depending on the title. Dead centre of the market. In this business, sitting dead centre means being invisible.
The problem was never size. It was identity.
You might assume a fifty-game studio is doomed against the giants who ship three titles a month. That is false, and two counterexamples settle it.
The boutique catalogue of Kalamba Games, the Kraków studio, plays in exactly the same volume bracket with comparable resources. The difference is that it built a visual grammar and a bonus system a player recognises in three seconds with the sound off. Same lesson from the opposite end at 1spin4win and its modernised classic fruit machines. Where Spearhead dabbled in a bit of everything, that studio turned ruthless specialisation in the retro format into a genuine trademark. Limiting yourself on purpose was how you became identifiable.
The Spearhead game provider did a bit of everything, and did it well. Clean, professional, consistent and entirely interchangeable. No player ever recognised a Spearhead game on screen without reading the name at the bottom. That single sentence is the cause of death.
The last widely catalogued release carries a date and a name: March 2024, Shamrock Surprise. After that, nothing. No announcement. No declared pause. Not one delayed roadmap. Just silence.
Act IV: the merger with Fantasma Games, October 2024
The buyout, with the numbers
On 11 September 2024, EveryMatrix filed a public offer for Fantasma Games AB, a Swedish studio founded in Stockholm in 2016 and listed on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market.
On 11 October 2024, the deal closed. 95.2% of shareholders accepted, comfortably above the 90% threshold required. The price was SEK 59 per share. That is SEK 209.8 million, or roughly €18.5 million in cash.
Fantasma brought exactly what Spearhead lacked, and it was not technology. It was identity. The Fantasma Games slots and their slots beyond gambling promise rested on a committed aesthetic. A mobile experience built to be played one-handed. Two hundred and fifty operators already integrated. A presence in 50 countries. The EveryMatrix CEO himself called these games among the best on the market. Nobody says that about their own in-house studio when it is doing fine.
The detail that says everything
In the official acquisition release, the group explained that Fantasma would complement existing in-house development at Armadillo Studios. That is the other house studio, opened in Miami in 2021 for the North American market.
Spearhead Studios is not mentioned. Not one line. Not a word.
An absence in a B2B press release is never an oversight. It is an editorial decision. That day, without anyone writing it down, the Marbella studio stopped existing in the mind of its parent company.
The disappearance, verified
Checked on 21 August 2026: the spearheadstudios.com domain returns an HTTP 302 redirect to fantasmagames.com. Homepage and news section alike. The Fantasma Games site, for its part, does not mention the Spearhead brand anywhere.
No more communication. No more releases. No site of its own. No product page. The games themselves survive, hosted on the group's infrastructure. They remain certified and distributed across several hundred casinos. A frozen catalogue, but still a live one. That nuance matters if you still stumble across these titles in a lobby.
What Spearhead Studios leaves behind
Five years. Around fifty games. Fifteen regulated jurisdictions. Zero revolutions. This is not a failure. It is a trajectory, and it met its brief.
Spearhead did precisely what EveryMatrix created it to do. It gave the group in-house production capacity. It opened regulated markets one by one with the patience of a civil servant. It fed an aggregation platform that went on to become one of the largest in the world. The studio served as a launchpad. Then they swapped the rocket.
One lesson remains, and it reaches well beyond this case. In online casino, execution quality is no longer enough. Making decent, consistent, honest, readable games protects you from nothing. What protects you is being recognisable. Spearhead was competent. It was not memorable. In a lobby of 29,000 titles, anonymous competence weighs nothing at all.
That said, some perspective is fair. In a sector where half the studios launched in 2019 never reached their third birthday, lasting five years and landing fourteen national certifications is hardly a rout. Plenty would have signed for that.
Do not confuse
A British company named SPEARHEAD STUDIOS LTD appears at Companies House under number 16571640, incorporated on 9 July 2025 at 167-169 Great Portland Street in London. Its declared business is the retail sale of books, games and toys. It has no connection to the online casino studio described on this Kynox page. The name overlap is coincidental, and the dates rule it out on their own. The British entity was born more than eight months after Spearhead Studios stopped producing.
There is also a war video game called Spearhead, with no link whatsoever to the internet casino sector.
FAQ: Spearhead Studios
Does Spearhead Studios still exist?
No, not as a standalone brand. The spearheadstudios.com domain has redirected to fantasmagames.com since EveryMatrix completed its Fantasma Games acquisition in late 2024. No game release is catalogued after March 2024. Existing titles remain distributed and certified across a significant number of casinos.
Who bought Spearhead Studios?
Nobody, strictly speaking. The studio was never resold, because it already belonged to EveryMatrix from its creation in 2019. The group itself ended the brand after acquiring Fantasma Games in October 2024 for roughly €18.5 million.
Where was Spearhead Studios based?
In Marbella, in Andalusia, southern Spain. The exact postal address was never published. The legal entity holding the licence under which the games were distributed, Everymatrix Software Limited, is registered in Sliema, Malta.
How many games did Spearhead Studios produce?
Around 48 to 50 own titles according to the reference catalogues, with counts reaching 70 at some aggregators. The portfolio held 31 titles in March 2021.
Under which licence were Spearhead Studios games distributed?
Under the Maltese B2B licence MGA/B2B/201/2011, held by Everymatrix Software Limited. It was backed by a UK Gambling Commission licence and by national certifications in the Netherlands, Romania, Croatia and around a dozen other jurisdictions.
What was the RTP of Spearhead Studios games?
Roughly 96% on average. The precise figure is 95.99% across the catalogue, in a range running from 95.81% to 97% depending on the title. Contrary to what several listings claim, the RTP was not uniform at 96% across the whole portfolio.
What happened to the Spearhead Studios games?
They remain hosted on the EveryMatrix remote game server and distributed through the SlotMatrix aggregator. The catalogue no longer grows, but it has not been pulled from the market.
