Light & Wonder – Paying It Forward
For the past few years, much talk surrounding supplier Light & Wonder has been about its rebirth as a focused cross-channel gaming content supplier and its rebranding as Light & Wonder after legacy Scientific Games shed its lottery and sports betting businesses.
This may be the year everyone starts concentrating on what Light & Wonder is now, the content it is creating, and the performance of its games in the marketplace.
The fact is, Light & Wonder has outgrown its past incarnation. Forbes just recognized the company as the “world’s fastest-growing slot machine company.” Since its last earnings report, L&W’s earnings are up 5.1 percent, outperforming the S&P 500.
It’s been that way for a while. L&W’s shares have soared 373 percent in the last five years, and were up another 11 percent in the past month.
According to Nathan Drane, chief product officer-gaming for L&W, the overall strategy has been to reinvest in the company, and in products for all game channels, on land and online.
It starts, of course, with R&D.
“In the last few years, we’ve been reinvesting in the R&D engine,” Drane says. “And that manifests itself in a few different ways. One of them is investing in talent. So not only have we added new talent, but we’ve been bolstering our existing talent.”
That investment is matched by investment in technology. “The strategy is not just talent, but our hardware investment—our technology investment,” Drane says. “And, our content investment has started to pay dividends.”
Filling the Cabinets
L&W’s G2E display will show off a flood of content for what have been highly successful new cabinet releases the past few years.
“The last five cabinets we’ve released have gone to that coveted No. 1 spot on Eilers-Fantini (Performance Report)—from Cosmic to the Kascada dual-screen to our Landmark stepper. That enables us to reinvest. This year, we’ve released two more cabinets.
“With the Horizon, we got back into the jumbo category. We also leveraged the Landmark stepper and went into the transparent stepper for-sale category. I’m excited because we’re going to debut two more hardware variants at G2E.”
The effort is making that R&D investment pay off. “The teams are busy, right?” says Drane. “We’ve grown the teams, we’re making sure we’re supporting the existing products and then we’re growing on top of that.”
One more cabinet reveal will come at G2E. “We’re going to come out with a new Cosmic Upright,” he says. “We haven’t debuted that yet to any customers or the market.”
The original Cosmic cabinet, introduced early last year, is a slant-top, with a 49-inch curved portrait monitor and sleek contours. “It’s been the No. 1 slant portrait cabinet, with over a dozen games over one and a half times house average,” Drane says.
“We want to double down on that. We’re going to bring it out as an upright. It’s going to have that beautiful Cosmic edge lighting, the 49-inch screen, that topper that’s so close to the main screen, making it feel like one contiguous experience… but it’s going to be on an upright base.
“We think that’s important. We think that’s what the market is looking for. So, we’ll be able to bring some of those great Cosmic titles to Cosmic Upright, but we’ll also be able to bring some of our latest content to that cabinet. We’re not only investing in hardware, we’re investing in studios and franchises.”
Growing the Families
Those franchises will be well-represented at L&W’s G2E booth. They include Huff N’ Puff, the No. 1 core game in the market at press time. Drane says the company will launch a Gaming Ops Premium version of the franchise at G2E, including a wide-area progressive version of Huff N’ Even More Puff, presented on the new jumbo cabinet Horizon, which features a 75-inch monitor with surrounding LED panels that bring the total display up to 90 inches.
The WAP version will be called Huff N’ Even More Puff Grand. “We’ll add a third wheel, we’ll grow the reels again, and offer the wide-area progressive,” says Drane. “It’s a good example of how we’re taking a brand from core video to premium and the wide-area progressive market, making sure that we’re satisfying our customer and player needs.”
Another extension of the brand is Huff N’ Puff Money Mansion, on the giant Mural cabinet. In this game, released in late summer, the massive Mural screen hosts a cash-on-reels bonus feature on an expanded reel array. The three little pigs randomly appear in the base game to help trigger the bonus.
Other brand extensions will take well-known brands to new cabinet presentations. A new entry to the legendary Dancing Drums game family will be one of the inaugural games on the new Cosmic Upright cabinet. Also on the Cosmic Upright will be new versions of the hit games Ultimate Fire Link and Invaders from the Planet Moolah.
“Ultimate Fire Link is one of the most successful games on our Mural and Kascada cabinets, and it’s been a mainstay hold-and-spin game for a long time,” Drane says. “We’ve really been managing that across not only high-denom players and low-denom players, but also on the different cabinet variants. You can see that on Kascada, you can see it on Wave, you can see it on Mural. We even have it on our new Horizon. So, we’re going to extend that on the new hardware variant.”
Big Licenses
Those games will join the two blockbuster inaugural games on the Horizon cabinet, Squid Game and Kong Skull Island. There will be several G2E reveals of new licensed entries, including refreshes of longstanding licenses.
“We invest in licensed brands because they provide a point of difference in our portfolio and have the potential to operate as a marketing vehicle for a casino,” Drane says, pointing to the early August debut of Squid Game at California’s Yamavaa’ Casino. “It was a huge point-of-interest game for the market and for players.”
Brand refreshes will include many of the most famous L&W licenses. One show reveal will be a new entry in the Wizard of Oz franchise, and there will be two new Monopoly-themed games at G2E.
Joining these will be a new licensed game based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit franchise and another new licensed game will be Rampage, based on the classic arcade game.
“So we’re not only going to double down on existing licenses, we’re going to bring a fresh injection of diversity there,” Drane says.
The licensed games will join a collection of core and premium video entries. Among the highlights is Wu Jin Pen, which combines a five-pot metamorphic feature with a hold-and-spin bonus.
“This is one of the first five-pot games that’s ever been created,” Drane says. “We’re making sure that we are innovating in categories like that and we’re coming out with new themes coupled with new mechanics.”
Steppers, VLTs and More
Core video, of course, is only one of the categories L&W will highlight at the G2E show. The company will display innovative new games on the various iterations of the Landmark stepper cabinet.
On the original Landmark 7000 is a game that packs in just about everything that could be loved by a traditional mechanical stepper player, and the name says it all: Double Black & White.
Another new stepper on the Landmark is Easy Money Deluxe, which features a flashing top-box bonus that adds multipliers and credit prizes. Featured on the Landmark Transparent is Bang! Bam! Boom!, which includes the first three-pot metamorphic feature on a stepper slot.
L&W also will include adjacent market displays in its booth of games for video lottery markets in Oregon, Illinois and elsewhere. “We’ve invested in the Oregon State Lottery market,” Drane says. “We’ve gotten back into that market with our best hardware, and we’re bringing our best content to that market, where it is performing well.”
The company has also invested in new markets, such as the Georgia COAM market (Coin-Operated Amusement Machines). “We entered that market in Q1, and we’ve entered the Loto Quebec VLT market as well,” says Drane. “We’re continuing to invest in the historical horse racing market, which we’ve been in for a number of years.
“We continue to reinvest in those markets, as well as Class II, which has been a really important investment for us over the last three years. We rebooted the entire tech stack, both from a server perspective and our game perspective. We’ve seen a real improvement in our game performance.”
Finally, L&W continues to focus on its cross-platform content development.
“It’s a coordinated effort,” Drane says. “We have content being produced largely in land-based studios that goes to social and digital. Over 70 percent of our digital roadmap is land-based content, but they also produce their own custom content.”
Cross-platform content will be well-represented at L&W’s G2E booth.
“I like to say we’re just getting started,” Drane says. “The investments we’re making have increased our velocity to create market-leading hardware and content.
“Why that’s important and what we’re looking forward to demonstrating at G2E is that we can support not only the existing hardware, but with our growing studio network we can support new hardware as well.
“This year’s G2E will be really exciting.”
