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Walk around the casino floor and you’re bound to run into games with ties to well-known entertainment brands. Whether it be music, movies or game shows, certain slots relate to popular entertainment and leverage those positive connections to make a game that entertains on multiple levels.
The most ubiquitous licensed brand on casino floors is Wheel of Fortune, helmed for nearly 30 years by IGT. Wheel of Fortune slots is the most successful slot brand of all time, with games of multiple types and from multiple eras found on casino floors across the country. A new Wheel of Fortune slots millionaire is crowned on average every two weeks.
It doesn’t stop at Wheel of Fortune slots though – earlier this year, IGT launched another popular licensed slot in the form of the Whitney Houston slot machine, which has been a top performer since hitting casino floors.
So, what makes for a good license to pair with slots? And how do game developers keep things fresh for a game series with hundreds of titles? We spoke with members of the IGT team during this year’s Global Gaming Expo, to learn more about how they work with partners to create slots that will excite players and fans of the brands they’re based on.
Selecting the Right Partners
A lot of thought goes into finding the right brands to partner with. Jennifer Fales, VP of Brand Licensing and Social Casino Gaming at IGT, said they have a process to hone in on the right opportunities.
“Our starting point is to understand if the player demographic and the licensed core fan overlap,” she said. “Then we talk to our studios to understand, is there a creative passion? Does the studio have an idea? Do the creatives and the R&D teams have an excitement for the brand? Because they’re the ones creating it, they’re the ones bringing it to life.”
“Third, and just as importantly, is the availability of assets or design elements that we are allowed to use in the game for that individual brand and license.”
You’ve probably noticed trends in licensed slots during your casino visits, and that is intentional, because there’s elements that exist within the respective licenses that help make the leap to slots a smooth one.
“Game shows have always been a great category for us,” Fales said, “because when you think about a game show or a board game, there’s an inherent game mechanic, so there’s something for our team to grasp onto. There are mechanics that players know and love. Similarly, with movies and TV shows, there’s a plot line, there are characters, players are familiar with it, there are assets, so those typically are very good licenses for us.”
The Ubiquitous Wheel
This has certainly been the case for Wheel of Fortune. IGT has partnered with Sony, the producer of Wheel of Fortune, for 28 years now, and they recently announced a 10-year extension of the relationship which kicks off in January 2025.
The extension expands their partnership beyond slots, and during G2E the Wheel of Fortune brand was paired with formats including electronic table games, video lottery terminals, and marrying to another long-time strength of IGT, video poker.
Part of the goal is to cast a broad net and have a variety of offerings that reach out to different types of players, said Boris Hallerbach, Director of Product Management – Premium for IGT.
“One of the things I like to say is that we have a Wheel of Fortune for every slot player,” he said. “Wheel of Fortune started with the 3-reel mechanical slots, but a few years later we launched video cabinets, and then throughout its life, we’ve evolved each of those categories for the players.
“We have something for the high-denomination mechanical reel player. We have something for the video slot player. It’s a Wheel of Fortune game for every player.”
One goal for the series is to bring popular game formats that have seen success, and supercharge them with Wheel of Fortune-inspired graphics and the familiar wheel.
“The Wheel of Fortune license brings us a really great bonus mechanic with the wheel,”
Hallerbach said. “If we take a really strong game feature or bonus that worked in the market, we’re able to put it on steroids with the Wheel of Fortune brand, and players have really responded to that.”
Strong Collaborations
“With Wheel of Fortune, having almost 30 years collaborating with Sony means each side of the partnership can contribute their strengths, yielding a high-quality outcome each time,” Fales said.
“We know gaming, they know the brand, so it’s a great collaborative partnership,” she said, adding, “they can look at the iconography, the symbol set, and really give us guidance and feedback where we’re really the experts in game mechanics and math models. It’s a great marriage.”
The collaboration for Wheel of Fortune extended to working directly with co-host Vanna White and announcer Jim Thornton.
“We worked with Vanna to incorporate her name, likeness, images, and video in the games,” Fales said. “We launched our 4D cabinet with Vanna White 4D. It was a very successful game, probably our most successful in that product line. We did a five hour recording session with her, grabbed sound bites, video footage, photography. We also have assets from Sony. We’re able to use those, along with voiceovers from Jim Thornton, in many iterations in all of our games.”
Similarly, when it came to developing the Whitney Houston slot machine, Fales shared IGT worked closely with the Estate of Whitney Houston, as well as the music publisher, to achieve a game that celebrated the singer.
“The Whitney Houston experience was just fantastic. It was such a fun game to develop,” she said. “The Whitney Houston family helped us pick out photography, provided live concert footage, and we worked on song lists together. So that one in particular, knowing that the family really understands her as a person and an artist most of all, that was a really collaborative relationship.”
It’s About Addition, Not Subtraction
We asked IGT about the fear some players express about licensed games, in that they worry the potential to win is lower because the license must be paid for. In the case of Wheel of Fortune, there’s been no shortage of winners, with more than 4,500 jackpots of more than $100,000 since the series’ inception, with 1,200 of those being more than $1 million.
Hallerbach noted that part of the decision of slot machine payback, whether a licensed game or not, is in the hands of the casino.
“We develop all of our Wheel of Fortune games and our for-lease games in general with an array of payback percentages,” he said. “It is up to the casino operators to set the games for how they set their floors.”
But for-lease games like Wheel of Fortune slots do tend to have a higher bet amount, and that comes down to the fact that they’re adding a component, like the wheel spin, as a new layer. Hallerbach says that’s by design, to ensure players get a better feel when they play them.
“When we take a really strong game that’s worked in the market,” he said, “When we add a wheel bonus to it, rather than cheapening the features in the base game to afford that wheel bonus, we sometimes charge an ante bet for it, and that comes back to the player in terms of great wheel experiences.”
With the wide area progressives offered on most Wheel of Fortune games, players also often want to ensure they bet high enough to qualify for those sizable progressive jackpots.
And Finally: It Really Is All About Timing
And finally, we wouldn’t be Flip The Switch without asking about one other question. One of Brian Christopher’s most memorable videos is a live stream from 2018, where he played Wheel of Fortune and hit a $10,000 jackpot. In the video, he says that the outcome of the spin is determined when you press the button.
But is it all about timing, as Brian likes to say? Hallerbach confirms it’s the case.
“The Wheel of Fortune wheel presents you with the outcome when the player hits the spin button,” he said. “By law, we have a random number generator, or RNG, in the game, and each game outcome is determined randomly.
“When you hit that spin button, the RNG determines what the outcome is and the machine presents that outcome to you.”
So it’s literally in your hands – the wheel outcome is determined when you press spin to give that wheel a spin.
Thank you to IGT and their team for sharing their insights about how licensed slot machines are made, and some of the key ingredients that make them so fun to play!
If you want to learn where to play some of these licensed themes you can find them below:
