INTERVIEW OCTOBER 2026

Interview with Savvas Fellas: Saying no is way harder than saying yes

The MrQ founder on the frustration that built a company, the discipline of saying no, and challenging category norms following the increase in remote gaming duty to forty per cent.

One market, and the discipline of taking things out

MrQ now has between 175 and 200 employees and remains focused on the United Kingdom. Fellas calls it "laser-sharp focus".
"The headlines are nice to read and think about and contemplate over. Most people don't understand that they come at a huge, huge cost."
The answer, in his account, is to weigh each one against what the company already does well. That returns him to his governing principle.
"Saying no is way harder than saying yes. Less is more."
He applies it to almost everything: processes, frameworks, tools and services.

"It's very easy to take something and to make it complicated and to plug in this and just make it very fatty, very quick. It's almost like we're wired to do that to everything."
The opposite instinct, he argues, is harder.
"What's not wired in us is to take things out and to make it simple."
Fellas describes himself as a minimalist by nature, but he also sees simplicity as a skill.
The same principle shapes how he builds products. Rather than trying to make something perfect before launch, he prefers to strip it down, get it out and iterate quickly.

AI, he says, has made that easier and also more complicated. A website, a skill, an agent can now be created quickly, but they can also be added to just as quickly.
That discipline around simplicity, he concludes, has to be even stronger when working with AI.

The people writing the rules

Fellas believes public opinion around gambling in the UK has not improved and is probably worse.
"I like that perception, because you can challenge that, and that's the opportunity."
His bigger frustration is with the policymakers.
"I don't agree with people making these decisions who have never spent a day in the life of the private sector, and yet somehow they have authority over the private sector even though they lack experience."
"You have to know how businesses work, and we don't say that out loud. We don't say the quiet parts out loud, and I think we should."

He is particularly critical of the way gambling taxation has been approached, describing some of those decisions as reckless and ignorant.
In its November 2025 forecast, the Office for Budget Responsibility projected betting and gaming duty receipts of around £4bn for 2025–26. Fellas's point is that an industry contributing on that scale is still treated, as he puts it, like a second-class citizen.
"I employ close to 200 people. I pay a ton of tax in this country. And yet our voices are suppressed by those people."

The same forecast assumed that customers would bear roughly 90 per cent of the duty increases through changes to prices or payouts. It projected that the associated demand response would reduce the reform’s additional tax receipts by £500m in 2029–30.

He points to the Netherlands, where gambling tax rose from 30.5 to 34.2 per cent in January 2025. A June 2026 assessment by the Ministry of Finance and the regulator found that the expected increase in tax revenues had not been achieved. It cautioned that other changes in the market also affected receipts, making it difficult to isolate the impact of the tax rise. Fellas asks why policymakers are not held accountable when outcomes fall short.

He believes the Gambling Commission has powers it has not deployed, and points to gambling operators without a British licence still advertising to British consumers through Premier League sleeves. The league’s front-of-shirt gambling ban, in force from the 2026-27 season, does not cover sleeves. In May 2025 the Commission warned club officers at Bournemouth, Burnley, Fulham, Newcastle United and Wolverhampton Wanderers that they could be liable to prosecution if they promoted unlicensed gambling businesses transacting with consumers in Great Britain, and in September 2026 Entain said 11 of the league’s 20 clubs still held arrangements with operators lacking a British licence. Under current rules, such sponsorship agreements can be lawful if consumers in Great Britain cannot access the operators’ gambling services. A government consultation on banning these arrangements ran from 15 July to 9 September 2026.

During the interview, a marketing text arrived on his phone. The sender identified itself only as a new UK site. The message he read out advertised a casino operating outside GAMSTOP and offered a 1,000 per cent first-deposit bonus. Fellas asked aloud how they had obtained his number.
Politicians, in his account, act with impunity, and so does the black market.

"They have more in common with the black market than they realise."
He is equally impatient with how his own industry talks about itself.
"I think we're very good in this industry at really sugarcoating the rhetoric. I think we should just call a spade a spade."
The major operators, he argues, helped create the situation they now complain about.
"Historically, they've been part of the problem."

That accounting includes MrQ. On 20 September 2023 the Gambling Commission published a public statement following a section 116 review of Lindar Media Limited, then the operator of the brand, begun after a compliance assessment in September 2022. Between July 2021 and September 2022 the company was found to have breached licence conditions covering among other things anti-money laundering controls, responsible gambling practices and the annual contribution towards research, prevention and treatment.
Lindar Media agreed a settlement of £690,947, paid in lieu of a financial penalty to socially responsible causes and including a divestment of £50,947, together with a contribution towards the Commission’s investigation costs and the publication of a statement of facts.

Fellas says the audit that followed was "an all green letter". In December 2024 he posted publicly that MrQ had received what he called the cleanest bill of health one could wish for from the regulator.

“Our first big audit didn’t go well for us, it wasn’t systemic but it wasn’t good enough. I take the view here of ‘once bitten, twice shy’, if we ever fell short I would step away and let someone else lead, I never want to be part of the problem. But it did help define what we did next, much like our formative years as people involve mistakes that then shape us in the future, I see it in a similar way”

He is equally frustrated by bureaucracy. "You've just got a bunch of jobsworth people who are slaves to those processes and don't challenge them."
His conclusion is that the industry needs a new narrative, a new voice and a new coalition.

Challenging category norms

That instinct also runs through MrQ's marketing. The earlier campaign was "You win some, you lose some".
"It's just honest, and people like honesty."

It evolved into "Love Q, Hate Q" and "The casino you love to hate" — a deliberately different way of presenting a gambling brand. Fellas believes people appreciate the honesty and the respect, although he is careful to say there is no real empirical evidence for it.

MrQ says the same approach informs its game information and customer communications: it publishes return-to-player figures before every game, and answers Trustpilot reviews individually, including hostile ones, in the same voice it uses in its advertising.

The products follow the same logic.
MrQ has been building what it calls quick-to-market games. Fellas says a title can go from start to live start to finish, including certifications, sound etc is ~2 days, covering the whole spectrum — sound, design, quality assurance and certification. AI has helped accelerate that, he says, while increasing the need to keep the process focused and simple.
Q+, which the company describes as a season pass, costs £20 for 30 days and can be repurchased once it expires. It bundles free spins, roulette chips and weekly cashback, alongside a £30 payment if a withdrawal is not instant, subject to the applicable terms. Fellas describes it as a basket of goods, hard goods and soft goods, and says the company is still experimenting with the format.
Arena is built around daily leaderboards, with players competing against each other for prizes. Fellas calls it shared entertainment. Behind it sits a question he cannot yet answer.
"Does the win feel as big when I'm sharing it? Does the loss feel as big when I'm sharing it? My theory is no."
He arrives at it through a phrase he had used earlier about something else entirely.
"A problem shared is a problem halved."

His question is about how a loss feels rather than what it costs. He believes sharing may soften it, and is clear that he cannot yet show it.
The fourth product is Qoins, a secondary currency, and the point, in his account, is what it is not.
"If I just gave you a secondary coin and you could just use that to spin a slot, it's boring. It's just boring."
According to MrQ, players receive Qoins daily and can accumulate them to use in games that the company describes as non-gambling entertainment.
The machinery underneath remains familiar. There is still a random number generator. Everything on top of it, he argues, is a choice.
"This industry is largely a bunch of copycats."
"Debating is my love language. I like to challenge."
The company's stated mission, which Fellas repeats publicly, gives the pattern its shape: to make every play unforgettable, and to burn the rulebook when it gets in the way.
When he plays himself, he likes roulette and blackjack for the element of control. He likes what MrQ calls Quickies for the same reason — quick in, quick out, with the player choosing when to cash out.

The one he returns to is Arena.
"I love anything that is synchronous entertainment. I love anything that is shared."

Article written by Elisabet Johansson

Further Reading & Key Sources