Ainsworth G2E Preview: The Ainsworth view

How will Ainsworth’s booth showcase recent innovation? 

Sean Evans: We are unveiling a new cabinet, the Raptor 832, with a similar base that the Raptor’s on but with three 32-inch, highdefinition monitors, available front and center at the booth. We are also introducing our first new hardware for the US market in two years. About 30% of the North American marketplace is still purchasing dual screens, and we haven’t been in that space yet. It also plays better to some of our higherdenomination product offerings, our dual screens as we see from old 560s and 600s. We’re pretty excited to have an additional bump or product offering in our arsenal. 

Keith Kruczynski: We’re focusing on brand extension, building upon our current successes as well as innovation. One of the cool things you’re going to see along the lines of what Sean was talking about is taking an old school, really successful Ainsworth high-denom title, and bringing it to 2025 and 2026. We’ve had some successes, let’s build upon those and make them even better. As for innovation, we’ll be showing Train Heist, which is our foray into a Western theme with perceived persistence and a really awesome holding spin feature. We also have Dragon Legacy, which we showed over at IGA in April, but what’s going to be great about showing it at G2E this year is that it’s real and ready. It’s approved, ready to go and visitors can play it right then and there. 

How has G2E grown so much over the past 25 years? 

KK: I definitely know a lot more people now than I did 20 years ago! From a personal standpoint, the most fun part is catching up with old colleagues and seeing the cool stuff they’re working on. It’s also how many more players there are in the industry now. Before, there were the big three or four, but now there’s just so many, and I think it requires even more comfortable walking shoes because you have to go to more booths! 

In what ways can G2E present opportunities for Ainsworth? 

SE: For us, we’re in the process of transforming Ainsworth, which has been underway for around a year and we’re really starting to make radical changes. We’ve got five business verticals here, Class II, Class III, HHR, online and VLT. We’re really trying to focus on each to maximize our growth in those areas. Being able to showcase all those products in one space is great and we also conduct blind surveys at G2E. We did that last year, and it was just a cutthroat question of what was the best product you saw at our booth. It’s very important to also gain a comparison against our peers, our other competitors and confirmation from our customers that we’re on the right track. 

We’ve taken a different approach and, as I say, transformational, more than anything in that we are looking at the attributes of the top-performing games every month. We just produced an updated one-year report, which ended up being a 31-page document that we presented to the game dev team. So it’s twofold, making sure you’re on par with the competition and then getting that feedback directly from the customers. I like the anonymous approach because that’s where you get the real feedback. 

What will you showcase on an iGaming front? 

KK: One of the big initiatives we’ve done this year is working closer with the studios and the iGaming team. Before this year, there was no visibility, we didn’t even know what they were working on or what was in the pipeline. There’s a lot more firepower behind the iGaming side now that we’re really getting the studios embedded into that side of the business. 

We’re learning about their struggles and things they have to deal with that we don’t. I think you’re going to see a lot more of that collaboration from Ainsworth moving forward. 

Kirk Geller

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