Live Play Mobile scales live-hosted mobile gaming globally with ultra-low latency Digital Humans powered by Agora

Gaming / Digital Humans

Problem

Delivering engaging live-hosted casino gaming at global scale, 24/7

Solution

Digital human hosts powered by Agora Conversational AI Engine and streamed on Agora's carrier-grade real-time communications infrastructure

Results

Avatar-hosted games delivering level of engagement comparable to live-hosted experiences

75% increase in player retention rate for avatar-hosted games vs. non-hosted games

1.75x higher revenue per user for avatar-hosted sessions vs. non-hosted sessions

About Live Play Mobile

Delivering world-class entertainment through live-hosted social casino games

Live Play Mobile is a live-hosted mobile gaming platform built at the intersection of social casino games, live streaming, and linear television. Its flagship experience, Live Play Bingo, brings real-life hosts into free-to-play bingo and casino-style gameplay, creating a 24/7 broadcast experience designed to make players feel engaged.

Live Play Mobile was co-founded by Stuart Lewis-Smith and Geremie Camara, veterans of live TV game-show production and casino gaming, to combine the engagement of live game shows with a business model that could support always-on interactive entertainment. The company launched in June 2020 and immediately scaled into a 24-hour live operation.

Today, Live Play Mobile is retooling its platform for B2B distribution across social casino, sweepstakes, crypto, and other casino-adjacent markets - and doubling down on a bold new vision: having the best human and AI hosts on the planet, leveraging Agora's conversational AI for digital human hosts.

The Problem

Making social casino games feel instant, global, and personal - at scale

Live Play Mobile's social casino experiences depend on immediacy. In a hosted game, the broadcast can’t feel like a passive stream; it has to feel like a shared live event where hosts respond in the moment and players stay engaged through personal conversations.

Based on the co-founders’ experience building live game experiences for major entertainment brands, the technology problem was clear: sub-second latency at scale was difficult to achieve with off-the-shelf tools.

For Live Play Mobile, the requirements were even more specific - the platform needed a live, interactive video layer that could launch globally from day one, support mobile game development in Unity, and stay responsive enough that the host-player dynamic felt real. More recently, as the company moved toward B2B casino distribution, it also needed a way to scale hosted content beyond the limits of hiring, training, and scheduling human hosts.

Key challenges included:

Delivering sub-second, glass-to-glass latency for live interactive gaming

SDK that could support mobile game development in Unity

Scaling 24/7 live-hosted content with human talent

The Solution

A real-time engagement platform for human & AI hosts, and always-on gameplay

Geremie had encountered Agora while working on a previous live-streaming startup. At the time, he saw Agora deliver sub-second glass-to-glass latency in a way that felt fundamentally different from the options he had evaluated elsewhere.

Agora's real-time engagement infrastructure helped Live Play Mobile launch worldwide and maintain an interactive video experience without the need to build a global low-latency WebRTC stack from scratch. A critical advantage at the time was Agora's Unity SDK. In 2019, rolling out a custom Unity-compatible integration that worked reliably across platforms was an enormous technical lift. This became a meaningful switching cost — and kept Live Play Mobile firmly on Agora as the platform scaled from a garage studio to a 24/7 worldwide operation.

Today, Live Play Mobile is deploying Agora's Conversational AI Engine as the core of its next-generation AI host platform, building on top of over 100,000 hours of human-hosted footage and transcripts to inform what great hosting looks like. This capability is enabling a new model: AI hosts seamlessly filling the hours when human hosts are offline, driving engagement and revenue that would otherwise be lost to unhosted gameplay.