ICE London opened its grand expo floor today, showcasing 633 exhibitor brands from 67 countries, occupying 40 of the 44 halls at the ExCeL. Clarion revealed this year is set to be the largest ICE on record, with 35,000 professionals expected to attend across the next three days.
Scientific Games has one of the most impressive displays on offer as always, including SG Digital’s latest innovations for the online gambling industry. EVP and Group CEO Jordan Levin walked us through “Missions” and “Jackpot Wars”, two of their products on showcase at ICE London.
“These are products that we’ve developed that really take social features, engagement and player entertainment features and bring them into the real money gaming casino space”, Levin shared with CalvinAyre.com.
“They’re out there on the floor, some of them are actually live with customers already and doing very well”, he revealed.
“They really provide players with more player entertainment, more than just straight ahead gambling, but also ways to mission or ways when you’re chasing a goal, for instance, jackpot wars- choose your own robot and then face off against somebody else that’s maybe in the game and win some type of big jackpot- compete for different types of prizes”, Levin explained.
“So really taking real money gaming to the next level with better and newer player emersion features”, he added.
Netent’s annual ICE London reveal attracted a big crowd as always, with an open bar and two new slot brands announced, the Gordon Ramsey Hell’s Kitchen Slot and Street Fighter II partnership. Netent also revealed their ground-breaking community jackpot system, Starburst PowerPots, an innovation NetEnt’s Director of Games, Bryan Upton, was delighted to elaborate on.
“We’ve been working long and hard on something that’s the next, next level. So we have a community element, we have a collection element, we have an offline payment part of it, it has everything”, he told CalvinAyre.com in an exclusive interview after the reveal.
“So its totally configurable, customizable, we’ve just gone to town and we put the Starburst brand which is the biggest one and so far the positive response has been amazing”, he added.
Woohoo Games, a new games studio for iGaming operators and integrated with aggregators such as Nektan, We are casino, Solid gaming, iGaming platform (and more to come), are here at ICE to educate prospective customers on their unique offering.
“We’re launching Woohoo Games here at ICE this year. We’re making content for all markets, but we saw this particular gap in the Indian market where there was virtually no RNG version of the localized games”, Ed Whittington, Woohoo Games’ Head of Business Development shared.
“So we’re launching with five localized Indian games, two versions of Teen Patti, a version of Andar Bahar, spin the wheel and a cricket themed slot”, he revealed.
Woohoo Games are also here to provide a little VIP treatment for their current partners.
“We’ve branded a number of black cabs with Woohoo and we’ve given a private cab to all our key partners so they can avoid the hideous taxi queues, take them to the parties, dinners, have a private chauffer to deliver them around wherever they want”, Whittington added.
ICE VOX continued its selection of conference tracks today and the Advertising and Marketing track featured “outside in” speaker Nidal Ramini who has worked with the Jack Daniels brand for 12 years. Thanks to a robust global branding strategy since 1955, Jack Daniels enjoys a strong presence in 175 countries, valuable experience the global gambling industry can learn from.
“We always have what we call local nuances”, Ramini explained.
“But, as I was going through in the presentation today, talking to the delegates here at ICE London, we have our brand purpose and our brand values and we stick to those, and if you’re talking to a personality as opposed to an individual, it will feel individual because it will resonate with people and that doesn’t matter if you’re from Tottenham or Timbuktu. It will always work for you”, he said.
We’ll see you tomorrow with more highlights from ICE London, including several celeb appearances and more innovations from the expo floor. For the latest gambling industry news, event coverage and exclusive interviews, subscribe to CalvinAyre.com.
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