Aruze unveils new igaming strategy, to introduce new features, games, at G2E

October 4, 2022 9:33 AM
Photo: G2E 2021/CDC Gaming Reports
  • Rege Behe, CDC Gaming Reports
October 4, 2022 9:33 AM
  • Rege Behe, CDC Gaming Reports

For developer Aruze Gaming, it’s not enough to have a couple of new releases each year. The Las Vegas-based provider of products to the global gaming industry realizes that in order to stay competitive in a burgeoning market, it has to constantly be at the forefront of innovation and design.

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“The goal is to have two or three games a month,” says Aruze Gaming Vice President of iGaming Kurt Hansen. “Sometimes it doesn’t end up being linear. Sometimes it ends up four or five will get dropped. “

No matter how many games are released in a month, the goal remains the same: to provide quality products that are accessible and easy to use. Aruze Gaming will showcase its products Oct. 11-13 at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas.

Aruze announced Tuesday that it plans to leverage some of its popular games to enter regulated igaming markets and prepare for new and expanding markets. Aruze also will expand its international partnerships to make its titles available to global players.

Aruze’s products include popular game titles Golden Magic and Ultra Stack Lion. Hansen says these products have crossover appeal between brick-and-mortar casinos and online gaming.

The key is getting a game’s dimensions right-sized for use on computer screens, tablets, and even phones.

“Innovation is our tradition,” Hansen says, “so we’re really trying to bring that into the digital space, take our existing portfolio and innovate on it when we’re trying to bring it to the digital side.

“If you look at some of the cabinets you’ll see next week in Vegas (at G2E), there’s no way the majority of those games work on the digital side. (Some games) are not going to translate to a 6-inch phone. So how do we innovate those games, how do we innovate the customer experience so that it’s similar to experience (to games in a brick-and-mortar casino)?”

Aruze has approximately 30 titles available for play in New Jersey and plans to expand into Pennsylvania and possibly Ontario by year’s end. The international market is also expected to open up to Aruze in the next year.

Hansen thinks the company’s experiences in New Jersey, which launched online gaming in 2013, resulted in building more flexibility into Aruze’s games and technology.

“When the games initially launched in New Jersey, the games performed incredibly well, but operators wanted us to allow larger bets,” Hansen says. “We had to go back and build in some of that flexibility into our games and systems… Once we got into the market, we learned how the market responded to the games, which was incredibly well. But we had to answer for ourselves in terms of some of the things we couldn’t actually implement. Simple things like larger bet limits, we had to change how some of our higher jackpots were structured.”

Hansen notes that Aruze will introduce some “very differentiated” land-based and online games next week at G2E.

“You’ll see some non-traditional style games,” he says. ”A little more entertainment-based style of games with some really interesting bonus features. But a lot of what we’re bringing online is from our land-based portfolio, some historical games that have performed really well for Aruze across all the markets.”