Live 5 Gaming: The Studio That Left Britain

By Jack Henshaw, Head Writer · Published 22 August 2026 · Licences and ownership checked against primary registers

Live 5 is usually described as a small independent British slot studio. It is neither independent nor, in Britain, currently a studio: it has been a William Hill subsidiary since February 2022, it surrendered every UK Gambling Commission licence on 1 August 2025, and both its companies are now registered as non-trading. This review sets out what the catalogue was, what it published, and what the registers actually say.

Live 5 Gaming at a glance

Licence data from the Gambling Commission public register; corporate data from Companies House. Both checked 24 August 2026.

Live 5 has left Britain

Almost everything written about Live 5 online describes a small, independent British slot studio with a boutique catalogue and a Staffordshire address. That description was already out of date when it was written, and it is now wrong in every particular.

On 1 August 2025, Live 5 Limited surrendered all four of the British licences it had held since February 2017: gambling software and gaming machine technical software, in both non-remote and ancillary remote form. Surrender is the studio’s own decision, not a regulator’s sanction — there is no enforcement action anywhere on its record. It simply stopped.

Both Live 5 companies are now classified at Companies House under SIC code 74990, non-trading company. The studio’s website, live5.co.uk, served a full site as recently as January 2026 and today serves a generic domain-parking page. Its newsroom’s last entry was published in May 2023 and was never followed.

A machine company before it was a slot studio

The London registered office and the online catalogue give a misleading impression of what this business was. Live 5 began in the West Midlands machine trade, and for its first several years it was a land-based supplier that also happened to ship online.

Its own About page said so plainly: the story started at a Wolverhampton designer and manufacturer of analogue slot machines, and the founding team’s earlier careers ran through Games Media, Barcrest, Astra and SG Gaming. That is a pub-and-arcade pedigree, not an iGaming one, and it shows in everything the studio built afterwards.

The first trading entity, Live 5 Gaming Ltd, was incorporated in June 2013 at an industrial estate in Essington, near Wolverhampton, and dissolved in May 2017. The company this review is about — Live 5 Limited — was incorporated in October 2016 and took its British licences in February 2017.

In those early years the studio traded on somebody else’s technical licence. The licence number printed in its own 2015 site footer belongs to a pub-machine supplier registered at the same Wolverhampton unit, which held gaming machine technical licences from 2013 until surrendering them in April 2024.

The debut game, The Sky’s The Limit, was a land-based title ported online. It went live with Sky Vegas on 30 July 2015 — a date widely misreported as 2015’s successor year — and the studio’s own newsroom set out a deployment plan that reads like nothing a modern online studio would write: betting shops via SG Gaming from December 2015, bingo halls via Gala, Mecca and ECM from that November, and pub and club machines exclusively through the Wolverhampton supplier.

Who actually owns Live 5

This is the part the trade coverage missed entirely, and it reframes the studio’s whole history.

Live 5 Limited is more than 75 per cent owned by Live 5 Holdings Limited, which has itself been more than 75 per cent owned by William Hill Limited since 17 February 2022, at a total consideration William Hill’s own statutory accounts put at £4.3 million — shares, voting rights and the right to appoint and remove directors. Above William Hill the chain runs through two intermediate holding companies to 888 Holdings Plc, which has traded as evoke plc since May 2024. Every link is recorded on the Companies House register of persons with significant control.

The timing is worth pausing on. William Hill took control in February 2022 while William Hill was itself still owned by Caesars. Four and a half months later the William Hill International business passed to 888. Live 5 therefore changed ultimate parent twice inside a single year, and we can find no public announcement of either event. The purchase itself surfaces only as a line in William Hill’s accounts, which also record that the revenue and profit arising from it were subsequently “immaterial”.

That does not make the games worse. It does mean that a catalogue widely described as an independent studio winning distribution deals was, in the main, a group supplying itself.

The catalogue, with every published figure

Thirty titles with returns the studio published itself. We recovered these from archived copies of Live 5’s own game pages, because those pages no longer exist. The full catalogue ran to roughly 45 to 50 titles; the rest never carried a published figure we could source.

Figures exactly as Live 5 published them on its own game pages. The studio labelled the win column “win over” rather than maximum win. Volatility appeared on those pages only as an unlabelled graphic and cannot be recovered, so we do not print it.

The maths problem

Here is the finding that should govern how you read this studio. Live 5’s own published returns run from 91.91 per cent to 96.34 per cent, with a median of 95.18 per cent. Only four titles reach 96 per cent at all. Thirteen sit below 95. Seven sit below 93 per cent.

For context, among the studios in our provider RTP table that publish anything at all, roughly two thirds put their top build between 96 and 96.9 per cent. Live 5’s best game would be an unremarkable default at most competitors. Its worst — Mega Cash Pusher at 91.91 per cent — is the kind of number normally found only in reduced operator builds that studios do not advertise.

Two things make this worse rather than better. First, these are not leaked figures or third-party estimates: they are the numbers Live 5 chose to publish about itself, which means the real floor is not higher than this and could be lower at individual operators. Second, the branded exclusive built for its own parent — William Hill Vegas Lightning Lines — publishes 92.00 per cent. When a supplier builds a bespoke game for the group that owns it, that is the return it selects.

We want to be fair about the land-based context. Live 5 held gaming machine technical software licences as well as online ones, and pub and arcade machine maths has always run leaner than online maths. A catalogue designed to work in both places will look poor judged purely by online standards. But a British player choosing a game online is choosing among online options, and against those, these numbers are simply poor.

What the studio actually built

Judged on design rather than returns, Live 5 was more inventive than its size suggested. It trademarked a set of named mechanics and reused them across the catalogue in a way that gave the games a recognisable house style.

Lightning Lines was the signature: a hold-and-respin format built around collected symbols, used on Royal Tiger, Sheba and the William Hill branded title. InstaPots attached instant-win pots to the base game, appearing on Gem of a Joker and Taro’s Tale. ReelzUp expanded the grid during play — the mechanism behind Erupting Wilds moving from 5×3 to 5×5, and Ship’s Bounty climbing to 16,807 ways. 3 Books was the studio’s take on the book format, and Boost came in Super, Mega, Ultra and Ultra+ tiers.

The catalogue also shows genuine range in format. Snake runs on a 7×7 grid. Fortune Lucky expands to 25,088 ways. Luck of the Charms is a 3×3 with 27 lines. Gems of the Nile uses an unusual 5×10 frame. For a studio of this size that is a lot of structural variety, and it is the strongest argument that the people building these games knew what they were doing.

The British licence position

Live 5 Limited held four licences under account 47418, granted 6 February 2017 and surrendered with effect from 1 August 2025: gambling software and gaming machine technical software, each in non-remote and ancillary remote form. Nothing on the record was suspended or revoked, and the account carries no regulatory actions.

Under section 41 of the Gambling Act 2005, supplying gambling software into Great Britain in the course of a business requires an operating licence. Live 5 no longer holds one. Whatever happens to its games from here happens under somebody else’s licence, not its own.

There is a suggestive detail we can report but not confirm. LNW Gaming UK Limited, part of Light & Wonder, was granted a British remote gambling software licence on 11 March 2025 — five months before Live 5 surrendered — and Light & Wonder’s iGaming site still lists Live 5 as a partner studio, showing the title Win In Rome. That sequence is consistent with the content moving to supply under Light & Wonder’s licence. It is equally consistent with supply under evoke’s own licences. We could not establish which from any primary source, so we are not going to assert either.

Can you still play Live 5 games in Britain?

Possibly, but not because of anything Live 5 holds.

If a UKGC-licensed operator supplies these titles today, it does so under its own or a third party’s software licence. Given the ownership chain, evoke’s British brands are the most likely place to encounter them, and Light & Wonder’s partner listing suggests a second possible route. We checked and could not confirm either, and we are not going to tell you a game is available when we have not verified that it is.

What we can tell you is what to do if you find one. Open the rules screen and read the return figure before you stake anything. On this catalogue that advice is not boilerplate: the difference between the best and worst title here is four and a half percentage points, which is a larger spread than most studios have between their top build and their lowest reduced build.

One curiosity worth flagging. Light & Wonder’s listing for Win In Rome describes a maximum of “up to 300x”. Live 5’s own page for the same game published 3,000x. One of those is wrong, and it is a useful illustration of why we take figures from the studio that made the game rather than from whoever is distributing it.

How it compares

Positions as at August 2026.

Safer play

A studio’s reputation, its licences and its published returns tell you whether a game is built properly. None of them tells you a session will go well. Over any period you will actually play, variance dominates the return figure completely.

Decide what an evening is worth before you open anything, and set a deposit limit at your casino rather than relying on judgement in the moment. If gambling has stopped being entertainment, BeGambleAware offers free, confidential support, and GAMSTOP blocks you from every UKGC-licensed site at once.

Our verdict

All Slot Providers score: 4/10.

There was a real studio here. The named mechanics were properly built, the format range was wider than the catalogue size suggested, and titles like Wolf 81 and Erupting Wilds show people who understood what makes a slot feel good to play. On design alone this would score well above the middle.

Everything else pulls hard the other way. The published returns are among the weakest we have recorded from any studio that publishes returns at all, and the branded game built for its own parent is one of the worst of them. The independence the catalogue was marketed on was not real: the studio had been a William Hill subsidiary since early 2022, and its celebrated operator deals were deals with itself. And it is now gone from the British market entirely, with no licence, no website and no trading activity.

If you meet a Live 5 game in a lobby, it is not a reason to leave. Check the rules screen, note which of these thirty numbers you have been given, and decide from there. But there is no case for going looking.

Live 5 Gaming: FAQs

Is Live 5 Gaming still a UK company?

Live 5 Limited remains registered at Companies House, number 10409476, at 1 Bedford Avenue in London. But it is classified as a non-trading company and surrendered all its British gambling licences on 1 August 2025.

Who owns Live 5?

William Hill Limited has held more than 75 per cent of Live 5’s parent company since 17 February 2022. Above William Hill the chain runs to 888 Holdings Plc, which has traded as evoke plc since May 2024. Live 5 is not an independent studio.

Why did Live 5 surrender its UK licence?

The register records a surrender, which is the company’s own decision, and there is no enforcement action on its account. No public explanation was given. Both Live 5 companies are now classified as non-trading.

What was Live 5’s best game?

By published return, Wolf 81 at 96.34 per cent, a 4×3 game with 81 lines and a stated win over 8,100x. It is the only Live 5 title whose return would look ordinary at a typical modern studio.

Are Live 5 slots low RTP?

Yes, by online standards. The studio’s own published figures run from 91.91 to 96.34 per cent with a median of 95.18. Seven of the 30 titles sit below 93 per cent, including the branded William Hill Vegas game at 92.00 per cent.

Can I still play Live 5 games at a UK casino?

Only if a UKGC-licensed operator supplies them under its own software licence, since Live 5 no longer holds one. We could not confirm which operators still carry the catalogue, so check the game’s rules screen for the return figure before playing.

What is Lightning Lines?

Live 5’s trademarked hold-and-respin mechanic, built around collected symbols, used on Royal Tiger, Sheba and the William Hill Vegas branded title. The studio also trademarked ReelzUp, InstaPots, 3 Books and Boost.