Who Is ELK Studios?
ELK Studios was founded in 2013 in Stockholm, Sweden, launching its debut title, The Lab, in 2014 and gaining its UK Gambling Commission licence (account #40844) the following year. The studio also holds a Malta Gaming Authority B2B licence (MGA/B2B/605/2018), along with licences covering Ontario (AGCO), Greece (HGC) and Romania. On 1 December 2021, ELK Studios was acquired by Scientific Games — since rebranded Light & Wonder — though it continues to operate with its own creative team and release slate rather than being folded into a shared studio brand.
What Makes ELK Studios Distinctive
ELK Studios describes its process as concept- and math-first: a game's theme and statistical model are built out before any visual design work begins, which the studio positions as the reason its games combine unusual mechanics with a consistent, high-production art style rather than reskinning a stock template. Two mechanics recur across its catalogue rather than sitting in a single title: CollectR™, a symbol-collection system introduced in the Pirots series where collected symbols persist across spins and feed larger bonus states, and X-iter™, a menu of paid bonus-entry options at different bet multipliers that let a player choose the trigger odds and cost of jumping straight into a feature round rather than waiting for it to land naturally.
Notable Titles
The Pirots series is ELK Studios' current flagship line, built around the CollectR™ mechanic and an expanding, transforming grid; Pirots 5 adds a Secret Door mechanic that rotates the grid and a Cursed Temple coin mini-game on top of the series' persistent collection meter. Wild Toro, and its sequels, is the studio's other long-running franchise, built around a Matador Respin Challenge that awards repeated respins as sticky Matador symbols land, ending when the bull symbol triggers its own bonus round.