GAME DEVELOPMENT
What’s new from Light & Wonder?
Wayne Ellard, managing director EMEA at Light & Wonder, spoke to GIO editor, Anjali Sooknanan about the game development process, the company’s presence in both online gaming and land- based casinos, and player trends for 2024.
of our people and the quality of the products that they make.
What is the research and development process when producing games for different markets?
What is new from Light & Wonder for 2024? We’ve got lots of new products and the investment we’ve put into our content studios over the last few years is really starting to show. Later this year, we’re looking forward to the launch of Squid Game. It’s obviously a brilliant license, it’s both eye-catching and fun. The style of game we’ve built is almost akin to a computer game. Instead of features, the players enter multiple levels. The players will start with ‘Red Light, Green Light’, and then you move to ‘Tug of War’ and then on to the ‘Bridge of Death’ which follows through to the main progressive jackpot.
Tell us about the game development process. A lot of our games are evolving so the player is taken on a journey – sometimes the mechanics evolve and we keep the branding similar, sometimes the brand is moved on, sometimes both. When you look across all of our games, each of them has a story behind them. We run a sophisticated segmentation model in our global product management team. This means we understand how many games to produce of a certain type, why we’re producing them, what markets they’ll be useful in and the different become more focused as a company, divested sports betting and made leadership changes, we’ve really tried to make it all about the games. We’re focused on making the best games, getting them out across as many channels as we can and supporting operators to maximise the outcomes. We trust in the quality
8 APRIL 2024 GIO
At regular intervals throughout the year, all of the studios and product management come together to talk about market challenges, what our competitors are doing and what our customers and players are asking from us. It’s a very collaborative process and it is designed to where the opportunities are. The studios will competitively pitch against each other as to why their game or concept works. Once they’ve been given the green light, product management stay very close because they are effectively the eyes and ears of the market for the studios. Throughout the development process, there is a lot of tweaking and it’s very much a live process. We stay with it all the way through to make sure that it remains right for our business needs.
Your offering consists of land-based and online gaming products. Why is it important to have a presence in both sides of the sector?
The simplest answer is that our customers want us to have a presence in both sides. If you look across the globe there’s a real mix of where gambling takes place. We’re able to take those game ideas and develop them for the social gaming market, for example. There’s generally less regulation in social gaming so you can get to market quicker as well as get perfect data to see exactly what players are doing. We had some games last year which we released initially into the social gaming market. We were able to do some testing to understand different types of players and what they preferred. The data taken from the social gaming market then sectors. A lot of our strongest social and iGaming titles actually started as land-based. Customers know these games and they’re used to playing them in land-based casinos so they naturally gravitate to them when they’re launched online. We have some amazing games across all of the channels so it makes sense to
offer them to players wherever they could take it. Rainbow Riches, for example, was traditionally a retail game and it has been our top game for years in land-based venues. When we launched the game online, it instantly became our top game because people know and like it.
What are players looking for in their games? Have trends changed?
Players want high quality entertaining games. They want to feel like they’ve got something to chase and that there’s value for money where they can win good prizes. That has and always will be the same. With more choice than ever before, the amount of time a player will spend within your game is getting shorter and shorter. If the player doesn’t like the game, they will simply look for another game and this often happens very quickly. This is causing us to look at the segmentation of our games. If you’ve got players who are playing for just a few minutes at a time and maybe they’re playing 20 or 30 spins on a game, having a feature that can only get every 200 spins can be a challenge sometimes because they’ll just never get to it. It’s really important to look at what we can do in game design to help them understand what the feature might look like, what it might do, where the money is in the feature, etc. If you look at hold and spin games, part of the reason why they’re very popular is because you can play two or three spins, understand what it’s about and see the amount that you can win on the screen. That shorter attention span means you’ve got to be clever about how you signpost to the players where the value is.
Tell us about Light & Wonder’s focus on responsible gaming.
We’re currently focused on player protection and safer gambling for players to make sure we’re upholding the right standards. It is obviously a regulatory challenge in at a lot of markets and we like to try to be at the front end of that. Last year, we did some external training with every person in our team in the UK to help them understand the impact of what happens when gambling goes wrong. We bear responsibility to our players and it’s important to us as a business that we invest in this area as
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
