Many of you reading this article watch content of people playing slots on social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook. (Our founder happens to be one of them.) With the explosive growth of this sort of content, a reader was curious if that has any impact on slots:
With the popularity of YouTube, are screen layouts of slot machines changing? To make them more viewer friendly.
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We haven’t seen a whole lot specifically around screen layouts, but we have heard some anecdotal examples of changes implemented reflecting that content is being made around these slots.
The overall form factor of slots has shifted to tall machines vs. wide machines, which works against longer form, horizontal content like you’d see on YouTube. Shorts have exploded in popularity, but the shift to taller machines began long before shorts as a format within slots became a key offering.
Before Everi’s merger with IGT, we spoke with some of their team around the time a new three-reel cabinet was introduced, and one of the key changes they made was in the backlighting to eliminate a flicker that showed up when filmed.
By doing so, it made the game more watchable within creators’ content, and allowed creators to give the games a go more easily without frustrating their viewers with a less than appealing session due to the flicker.
Another slot maker specifically showed off an ability to accelerate the count up mechanism at the head of a hold and spin bonus, something that earlier games like Lightning Link and Ultimate Fire Link did not offer. Slot content creators appreciate the ability to accelerate the count-up, especially on a not so great bonus.
So while the layouts themselves haven’t come up as a topic (although if we spoke to enough game makers I’d be surprised if it didn’t come up eventually), many of the changes were more around making sure the games weren’t negatively impacting viewership due to visual glitches or slow count-ups at the end of a bonus that’s already complete.
And with slots getting taller and shorts flipping the footage on its side, it’s likely a natural that this will shift how these games are presented as well over time. Slots are more often making more use of that full tall screen to show more than just progressives and pots, so we expect that will continue to evolve as well.
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