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IGT PlayDigital is considered a leading provider in the online gaming industry, with over 30 years of experience in the field. This developer is famous for offering engaging gaming experiences and always staying ahead of trends and player preferences.
Their team really understands emerging markets and evolving player behaviors, making them experts in creating engaging and player-focused gaming solutions.
This interview with Brett Jackson, the Head of Content, gave us the chance to discuss how IGT PlayDigital has successfully expanded into new markets, including Eastern Europe and the United States.
Jackson has been a brilliant addition to the IGT team. He brought decades of industry experience to his new role and is keen on developing unique perspectives using creativity, which has resulted in some top-performing iGaming Content.
Thus, if you take the time to read it until the end, you’ll know how they’ve created top games, adapted to strategies and tackled challenges. Join us and learn about one of the top leaders in the online gaming industry.
IGT has been a leader in the iGaming industry for over 3 decades now. How has IGT PlayDigital’s approach evolved over the years especially when it came to expanding on markets such as Eastern Europe?
IGT’s long held dominant position is a combination of innovation, our ability to deliver a wide range of gaming experiences and our focus on creating experiences that players love. We’re always tracking closely as new markets open or existing markets evolve. We stay relevant by listening to players and customers and using our data and experience to align to market needs.
Could you expand on that and share with us your biggest challenges and opportunities, both in Europe and the United States, and how does IGT PlayDigital adapt to local markets?
New markets continue to open and typically they have access to legacy land-based or unregulated online content or both. Studying that gives us a great starting point to refine our offering for that market. We’ve developed skills and flexible frameworks that allow us to create content that will work in the maximum number of markets, and we know when to tune specific games to specific market requirements. Progressive Jackpots for example have very different regulations depending on the market, and this is where IGT’s decades of global experience give us an advantage. And of course, we work with our customers at every opportunity to ensure we are providing responsible games that will resonate for their players.
IGT is known for creating iconic slot games. Can you walk us through the key stages of the slot development process and how player feedback influences the design?
Once we decide on which type of game, we want to make based on our global strategy and research, the studios use a very iterative approach to ensure the games are the best they can be. We review the games constantly to ensure we maximise the playability and fun of every game. The content we take from IGT land has already been through test banks which give us a very solid starting point for the online conversion. This is the case for our upcoming launch in the U.S., Mystery of the Lamp: Treasure Oasis.
How do you balance new game mechanics with maintaining the familiar elements that players grew to love?
When bringing a new mechanic to market, we sometime marry that with a well-known IGT brand like Cleopatra HyperHits for example, but we are careful not to lose the core character of the original brand and will merge both to achieve a design that brings the older game forward but present new mechanics in a recognizable way. In other cases, we’ll create a new theme for a new mechanic to help players intuitively understand the core aspects of the new mechanic rather than try to awkwardly shoehorn an existing brand that doesn’t fit as well. We believe that you need to constantly delight and surprise players without making them work too hard to understand an innovation.
Mystery of the Lamp has been recognized as a top-performing game with its multi-level progressive features. How did your development team approach balancing the traditional slot elements against the new gameplay mechanics to achieve this success?
Here at IGT PlayDigital we’re very lucky to partner with our exceptional land-based game studios, and with Mystery of the Lamp they have done all the heavy lifting in this regard. IGT PlayDigital brings the online expertise to ensure the online game experience is as close to the real-world casino experience as possible. Considering the online game is typically played on a mobile phone in a very different setting, the challenges are significant. We have worked very hard to become adept at reviewing each land game project to ensure we truly understand the important nuances to faithfully reproduce in the online experience.
What are some of the key trends in player behaviour that IGT PlayDigital is focusing on, and how do these trends influence your development strategy?
Interactivity seems to be something many online players enjoy and we’re looking at game formats that allow more player interaction.
We’re also seeing more arcade-like mechanics like tap and mines which are gaining in popularity in some markets, and we are creating new development pipelines to ensure we play a role in that space.
We watch the dominant trends in land closely, for example cash on reels, triple pot, and perceived persistence, and strive to be on top of those. Again, our land-based colleagues help us immensely there as well.
Looking ahead, what can we expect from IGT PlayDigital in terms of new game releases and market expansions? Are there any specific markets or game types that you see as particularly promising?
Our plans for 2025 include some never-before-seen mechanics, evolutions of lots of well known and loved games and we continue to innovate and deliver across all our key categories such as multi-level progressives, shared pool omni-channel jackpots, table games, video poker and steppers.
We’re tracking all possible market openings and are building roadmaps of games to answer the market’s needs.