Big indeed. Ladies and gentlemen, the 2019 Global Gaming Expo is now officially in the bag. Personally, this was my 6th G2E with Gamblit, and it’s getting more intense every year.
We have presented a selection of 20+ games (including a number of brand new ones making their debut at the show), and even 2 new additions to our hardware lineup.
One is a bartop unit capable of running our entire portfolio of games, and the other is the eSpire, an imposing gaming system standing 13 feet tall, featuring 2 large 4K screens, a holographic display, fancy multi-zone lighting, a wireless charging area for mobile phones, and more goodies.
The new breed of interactive casino games keeps marching ahead, slowly but steadily carving out a market-segment and classification of its own. Gamblit continues to lead the charge, with our games currently being available in more than 40 locations, in 24 jurisdictions across 9 states.
In another very welcome development, the games are also shedding their “skill-based” moniker, the necessity and inevitability of which I realized more than a year ago.
As the games evolved, the term “skill-based” has become increasingly less accurate to describe them.
While now several new terms are floating around ranging from “skill-influenced games” to “videogame gambling”, I refer to them simply as “interactive casino games”, which is the most descriptive blanket label I can think of.
In addition to our existing games, my Game Studio team brought 4 new titles to the show: an all-new version of our most popular game Lucky Words, a brand new Deal or No Deal Poker game, a dice-controlled fighting game called Dice Arena, and the matching game Gemflux, which could be best described as a cross-over between Bejeweled and Tetris.
I’m super excited about our upcoming new wave of games: they represent an order of magnitude improvement both in terms of the player experience, as well as floor performance.
Now let’s move on to some videos, starting with our traditional annual sizzle-reel from the show:
Some gameplay footage of Dice Arena.
I’m particularly biased about this one, and will definitely dedicate a separate article to it at some point.
I think it manages to elegantly combine a white-knuckle, all-or-nothing style gambling experience, a sense of agency, hilarious characters and slick production values in a package that seems to resonate with people:
Gameplay footage of Gemflux: