Executives of Light & Wonder (formerly Scientific Games) held an online slide show for investors on Thursday in which much of the talk was devoted to the name change, which was the outcome of a 12-month strategic review “investing in our people and products,” according to Chief Commercial Officer Siobhan Lane. “This new strategy required a powerful new identity,” she said, adding that the lottery division, when it is wholly divested, will continue under the Scientific Games brand.
The future Light & Wonder partnered with consultancy Lexicon, along with investors, analysts, and its employees to develop 2,700 new name options. Why was the final imprimatur chosen? “Customers view Light & Wonder as a highly inspirational name,” Lane explained, “inspired by the experience of our players in a game environment. It’s the light that you see when you walk into a casino … and we really liked the wonderment that our players get.”
Said Matt Wilson, CEO of the gaming division, “It’s a chance for us to start afresh. We have a new set of values, a new strategy, and a new financial profile.”
Scientific was a heavily indebted company. By selling the lottery and sports betting divisions, “those shackles are now lifted,” enabling more investment in staff and research and development.
“Almost everything has changed” at the former Scientific in the last two years, according to Wilson. Scientific was a company formed through myriad mergers and acquisitions, resulting in one that was divided into many niches. Leadership wanted to refocus around one core competency: gaming. To this end, Light & Wonder will rest on the tripod of traditional slot machines, SciPlay social gaming, and igaming. “It’s all about building world-class games,” Wilson said, unified across all three platforms.
“From the get-go, we have an unbelievable amount of brand in the pipeline,” Wilson continued. “In every segment, we have world-leading hardware,” technology that can put games in front of “millions of eyeballs” every day, as well as 56 percent of the global gaming-systems business, not to mention popular third-party games like Willy Wonka and Monopoly. Light & Wonder, Wilson continued, has “a compelling lineup of hardware across all the platforms,” including the Kascada dual-screen console that is going live in California, Canada, and Australia.
The company also just launched its Lunar New Year game both in British Columbia and on the internet. “We’ve got a really strong lineup for our Kascada cabinet,” Lane added. “Consumers like franchises and continuations of brands that they know and love over time,” ones which will be integrated into Kascada.
Light & Wonder has the largest igaming footprint, according to Nick Bannon, chief financial officer of igaming, with 4,000 games in almost 30 jurisdictions. Reeling off a list of new games hitting the market, he highlighted the company’s acquisitions of Lightning Box, a Sydney-based content provider, Elk Studios, a Swedish maker of online games, and Authentic Gaming, maker of live-gaming product for the European market.
In light of this new online emphasis, brick-and-mortar casinos will no longer be the default first market for new Light & Wonder games, some of which will now premiere online. In part, this is because Light & Wonder already has a massive back catalogue of slot games that can be repurposed for social and igaming play, a “much more dynamic” business model, in the words of Wilson.
The old Scientific sub-brands, like Bally and Shufflemaster, aren’t entirely vanishing, according to Lane. New games will all bear the Light & Wonder logo, but those already in the field won’t be retrofitted to reflect the company’s newly minted identity.
