At the recent SBC Summit Americas, Gaming Laboratories International’s Chief Commercial Officer Ian Hughes noted that he enjoyed wandering around the show floor, taking in all the innovations.
“You’ve got these entrepreneurs, one or two people, who’ve got a phenomenal idea,” Hughes told CDC Gaming. “Now some of them will never see the light of day. Some of them might be the next best thing since sliced bread. I love spending time looking at what’s new in the industry, because those types of things help breathe light into the newer player, the new experiences that people are looking for.”
GLI, founded in 1989, is the leading provider of independent testing, certification, and assessment services for the gaming industry. With offices from British Columbia, Canada, to Lakewood, New Jersey, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Haarlem, the Netherlands, there’s nary an inch of the globe that GLI does not cover.
Hughes, who has been with GLI since 2007, said the company can certify anything in any market.
“Whether it be a lottery modernization or whether it be the opening of a strip property like Resorts World (Las Vegas), when it comes to bringing everything together from the central system, responsible gaming, anti-money laundering, the products themselves, in terms of electronic game machines, electronic table games, felt games, table games, all those sorts of things come together,” Hughes said. “I think that’s one of the things that we can really do. We have competitors out there, which is great, but each of those are specialized in one area. … But nobody does what we do in terms of the level of depth and breadth that we cover.”
As gaming technology becomes more sophisticated and complex, GLI has become particularly useful. Hughes noted that the move away from manufacturers designing their operating systems to using operating systems by Linux and Microsoft, for instance, has created “oblique” issues to be solved.
“When it’s applied, the application of technology hits new regulatory issues that you haven’t seen before,” Hughes said. “One of the big problems was, okay, everybody’s using stuff online. So, how do you geolocation, or the geolocations that problems have happened to solve. I think they’re the biggest problems when you solve an application that doesn’t fit into where the red lights are.”
Hughes said that math used to solve issues via of probability and statistics, a foundation built on the number of possible outcomes. But math models are now more dynamic.
“They’re creating more and more complex games, more and more engaging to the player, and they throw up a set of challenges of how to determine what the requirements are,” Hughes said. “Some jurisdictions require us to calculate the volatility of the standard deviation, and for some of these math forms, it’s really, really hard to determine what they are, so we have to use a simulator.
“Now that manufacturers and suppliers are using more AI to write their code and do things like that, the implementation, the use of AI, is throwing up some huge challenges for us as well,” he said. “How do we test stuff that uses AI? We’re starting to see AI embedded in products.”
Hughes noted that manufacturers and operators have been “chasing the secret sauce” of what games resonate with players for as long as the gaming industry has existed. But the new complexity of games – whether they are popular or not – require a more stringent evaluation period
And longer to assess.
When Hughes worked for Aristocrat in Australia in the ‘90s, it would take him a half day to do the math for a game. Now, GLI employs between 100-120 mathematicians who do nothing but math all day long.
“Now, with math, you can’t do it in four hours,” Hughes said. “You’re talking 40, 80, 120 hours of effort. … This is just a verifier, most are writing simulators, so it creates new levels for us that we have to look at.”
GLI’s mathematicians and techniques are so advanced, so well thought out, they are able to test and verify a game within about two weeks of reception.
“We’re talking probably 40-to-60 engineering hours of effort for a new for a new game,” Hughes said, noting that customers demand speed and efficiency.
“That’s the customer saying to us when we send you a game, we want to get this out in two weeks,” Hughes said. “So, our processes and our tooling and our resources are being geared around the voice of the customer.”
