How Mid-Tier Slot Vendors Compete With the Big Three

You have like the big three vendors who can put out, you know, hundreds of games each year. And then you have kind of like a smaller midsize vendors. And it's like, I got, I got like five, I can do like five to eight, five to 20. And you don't, you have to be a little bit, you know, maybe a little bit more risk averse with, with your portfolio. So I definitely think the, the bigger three vendors have a little bit more opportunity to be a little bit more exploratory given just their resources. you don't that doesn't mean you you you can't take a calculated risk or evolve on something thoughtfully yeah what's your favorite part of all of this oh man i was thinking about this earlier there's a couple favorite parts but i loved you know a steward of the data and seeing it come in because it almost feels like sometimes i feel like god no not like god but like but like having like a front row seat to like history and action almost because we can you can see like it's so obvious sometimes like these huge inflection points like these disruptive games like when Hufflepuff came out i'm like you just we we just knew we just knew that this was going to be this is going to be something big um devil's lock is the other one i mentioned that we just you just kind of know and then we had uh most recently like railroad riches Sega Sam we knew that this was going to be just a huge um this is going to be a huge opportunity for them and really elevate them so it's really cool to kind of watch that history in action and just kind of being able to see kind of like the growth of these companies so I love that that would be I think I would get really excited if I saw a game go to number one I'm like I can't wait for them to see this so you talked a little bit about how the top the big three which are obviously the IGT, Light and Wonder, and Aristocrat. They obviously have way more wiggle room to create these games that are, they can have a lot more misses than mid-tier or the smaller suppliers. But what are the mid-tier suppliers doing right now that's like really working for them? Because they've had some, I mean, we mentioned Devil's Lock like five times. Yeah, yeah. You know, what is Konami doing really well? Like I've heard that their systems are really good. What's kind of setting the mid-tier apart right now to even compete with the big three, I mean Konami just launched after G2E um their newest portrait cabinet Solstice 49C which has been an absolute success lots of great games Bomberman, Red Fortune Rails so so that new cabinet and sort of I'm not sure if they had any changes to their their sort of product strategy but um huge success there we're seeing that in in both the game performance numbers than just sort of the installs that are going out on the floor um AGS has it has been quite on a run too lots of lots of top new games um lots of new cabinets obviously Sega Sammy has been another one that's kind of come into a little bit more elevated and in everyone's eyes and that was off of the the Railroad Riches game and we're kind of waiting to see uh what's next from them yeah quite quite a bit of good stuff from from those guys well we're gonna go into rapid fire now okay and this is where you just have to choose one or the other and that's that's your choice and that's what you're married to for forever okay and it's on record anyway no hold and spin or link mechanics which one does better they'll often be correlated but i will go with hold and spin persistence mechanics or jackpot mechanics i'm going to go persistence feature rich games or simple games with great math feature rich oh really but you can explain this one yeah so like a good like a good triple pot but nothing else going on what's a game that everybody copied too fast there was a lot of Bao Zhu Zhao Fu copycats there was a lot of those that's the firecracker one did it work out for them or no some of them did yeah what mechanic actually drives performance hold and spins cash on reels those are like really big ones right now it's kind of like interesting when you think about like kind of older games it was kind of like you were kind of looking for three symbols and you get into a free games and like okay i'm gonna write out this free games and now it's really just all about hold and spins just really hold and spin rich games i think we're also seeing a lot of shifts like artistically towards kind of like those 3d-ish cartoons like you know like almost like pixar-esque like um what it used to be like you'd walk into a casino it's like a sea of like crimson asian themes you know princesses realistic artwork and now it's like okay it's totally on the other side the pendulum's totally swung and we're um in this kind of like really whimsical and quirky kind of world now Thank you.