Pirots
The original, released on 7 March 2023, on a 5x5 grid. The birds and the collection idea start here.
Behind Pirots 5 sit two companies, three regulators and a franchise that has been rebuilt six times. ELK Studios works from Stockholm and has held a British gambling software licence since 19 March 2015; the Pirots birds are its longest running series, six chapters between March 2023 and July 2026, each one rebuilding the board rather than reskinning it.
Who ELK Studios are#
Two companies carry the name. ELKAB Studios AB sits at Master Samuelsgatan 56 in Stockholm and is the entity that holds the British licences. ELK Studios Malta Ltd is the Maltese supply company, holding the B2B licence that lets the studio’s games be delivered to operators across the Maltese framework.
The split is ordinary for the industry and useful to understand. A slot studio is a B2B supplier: it does not take your deposit, hold your balance or pay your withdrawal, and the casino does all three. What the studio supplies is the game, its maths and its build, and what its licences cover is exactly that. So when you read that the studio is licensed, the right conclusion is that the company supplying the build answers to those regulators for how it is made and delivered, not that any particular lobby is trustworthy. That second question belongs to where to play .
The practical result for you is visible inside the game. The build ships localized rules, English among them, so the return figure, the feature list and the payout-level system are all readable in the game’s own panel rather than only on pages like this one.
Licences and oversight#
The British layer comes first because it is the one that matters most to players in this market:
- Great Britain. ELKAB Studios AB holds an active gambling software (remote) licence, held since 19 March 2015, and an active game host (casino) (remote) licence, held since 12 February 2018, under account 40844.
- Malta. ELK Studios Malta Limited holds MGA/B2B/605/2018, a B2B critical supply licence for Type 1 gaming services, with a status of Licensed.
- Romania. ELKAB Studios AB holds class II licences 821/15.05.2020 and 820/15.05.2020.
Beyond those, regulated European markets tend to ask a software supplier for a permit of its own. One of them requires a separate game-software permit for anyone who manufactures or supplies software used by its licensees, at a fee of SEK 120,000. That is a market rule rather than a judgement on any company, but it tells you something useful: a studio that appears in regulated lobbies has chosen to do the paperwork for each of those markets, one at a time.
None of this predicts your results, and none of it makes a specific casino a good one. What it does do is explain why a game released on 23 July 2026 turns up on the shelves of regulated operators rather than only at the edges of the market.
The Pirots series at ELK Studios#
Six chapters in a little over three years, and the block above lists them with their dates. What is worth noticing is the shape of the progression. The original set out the birds and the collection idea on a 5x5 grid. The second chapter introduced CollectR and X-iter, the two systems the whole series now runs on and the reason a Pirots game feels like a Pirots game. The third stretched the board to 6x7. Pirots X went sideways instead of bigger, built around a global multiplier. Pirots 4 took the birds to space.
Pirots 5 is the chapter that adds choice: a 6x6 grid expanding to 8x8, three playable worlds selected from a map on entry, and a fourth world unlocked permanently by collecting all nine tokens. All three worlds ship under the same game id, 10266, which is the technical expression of the design idea: one game, three sets of scenery and rules on top of shared maths.
One thing the series does not do is share numbers. Each title has its own maths, so a return figure, a hit rate or a ceiling from one chapter never applies to another. If you have played Pirots 3 or Pirots 4 and are carrying expectations over, the series page is the place to reset them.
X-iter: the studio’s own feature#
X-iter is where the studio’s platform shows through. It is an ELK platform feature delivered together with the game, which means a casino does not integrate it separately. If the game is in the lobby, the panel is in the game. That is why the five prices are identical wherever you play: Bonus Hunt at 3x the bet, Mega Hunt at 10x, the world coin game at 50x, Bonus at 100x and Super Bonus at 250x.
Two rules travel with it. The first: X-iter is activated in the base game, so it is a decision you make from a standing start. The second, and the one that says most about how the studio builds: the theoretical payout for all X-iter modes equals the game’s RTP. A purchase changes your session’s shape, never its mathematics, and the rules state as much rather than leaving you to infer it. The features page breaks down what each price buys.
What a supplier’s licence means for you#
It is easy to read a list of licences as reassurance and leave it at that, so it is worth being precise about what each one does and does not cover.
A supplier licence covers the making and the delivery of the game: its maths, its build, its random number generation and the way it is served to a casino. That is what ELKAB Studios AB’s British gambling software licence and its game host licence are about, and what the Maltese B2B licence MGA/B2B/605/2018 covers for the Maltese framework. The Romanian class II licences do the same for that market.
What none of them covers is your account: deposits, withdrawals, bonus terms and customer service all belong to the casino, under its own licence. So the right way to use the list is as a filter on the game rather than on the lobby. A licensed supplier means the build you open is the one the studio published, with the figures it states about itself: a payback range topping out at 96.0% depending on the casino and the market, a 10,000x round cap with a 1,000,000 EUR exposure ceiling behind it, volatility 7 of 10 and a bet ladder from 0.20 to 100 EUR across 12 levels.
The lobby itself is a separate decision, and where to play is the page that makes it.
What the studio’s design habits look like in play#
Three patterns run through the studio’s work, and Pirots 5 shows all of them.
Mechanics before themes. CollectR arrived in the second Pirots chapter and has been the backbone ever since: four birds collecting adjacent symbols instead of lines landing on reels. The scenery changes every release, from a temple to a kraken to a golden city to space, while the engine is refined rather than replaced.
Priced choices, stated plainly. X-iter’s five prices and its payback rule are published in the rules rather than implied. That is a design stance: the studio would rather you knew that a 250x press buys tempo and not an edge.
Progress you keep. Nine tokens across three worlds unlock a fourth permanently, and the count is global and survives between sessions. In a genre where every round is drawn independently, that is the clearest sign of a studio thinking in sessions rather than spins.
The numbers this release publishes about itself fit that picture: a payback range topping out at 96.0% depending on the casino and the market, volatility rated 7 of 10, a hit frequency of 25.1% on the product sheet and 26.11% in the demo configuration, a 10,000x ceiling on a round and a bet ladder from 0.20 to 100 EUR across 12 levels. Specific, checkable figures rather than adjectives, which is the whole reason a supplier’s documentation matters to a player at all.
What an ELK release looks like#
A Pirots 5 launch is a package rather than a file. The studio published three product sheets, one each for Cursed Temple, The Kraken and City of Gold, along with three asset packages and a logo and thumbnail archive. That is the level of documentation operators and affiliates get, and it is the reason the numbers on this site can be quoted precisely: the return range, the volatility rating of 7 of 10, the 10,000x ceiling and the 0.20 to 100 EUR bet ladder are all stated by the studio rather than estimated by a reviewer.
The studio’s own platform feature travels with all of that. X-iter needs no separate integration, its five prices are the same wherever the game is served, 3x, 10x, 50x, 100x and 250x the bet, and across the twelve bet levels they come to anywhere between 0.60 and 25,000 EUR in cash.
The three worlds under one game id tell you something about how the studio thinks, too: rather than shipping three games and asking you to choose in the lobby, it shipped one and put the choice inside. Try it for yourself in the free demo , or read the whole profile on the Pirots 5 main page before you take it to a casino.
