“ Too often with companies our size , you can have a one-hit wonder and then you try and clone it and clone it . Then it becomes more and more difficult ... We have to work more towards diversifying across the floor to hit multiple play mechanics that we believe customers are really looking for .”
— Sean Evans , Vice President of Product Strategy , Sales and Marketing , Ainsworth ket , and the key to future growth will be to unlock new opportunities in other verticals .
“ Too often with companies our size , you can have a one-hit wonder and then you try and clone it and clone it . Then it becomes more and more difficult ,” he says . “ I ’ m thinking we have to work more towards diversifying across the floor to hit multiple play mechanics that we believe customers are really looking for .” That ’ s where Kruczynski comes in . A veteran game designer and studio manager , Kruczynski knew immediately that the company ’ s problem wasn ’ t a lack of talent , but rather a lack of cohesiveness , collaboration and overall company pride .
“ Ainsworth has some of the best talent in the industry that I ’ ve ever gotten the opportunity to work with across the board — designers , engineers , artists , testers ,” he explains . “ It was a team of really brilliant , dedicated people who knew what they were doing , knew what they were talking about . It was just that everyone was going in different directions .”
An increased emphasis on communication has allowed previous information silos to come down , and that in turn has sparked a renewed buy-in from all levels of the company . Kruczynski says this past G2E was an example of this progress , as employees “ from the manufacturing floor all the way through the C-suite ” got to participate and take in the experience .
And on the game side , he echoes Evans ’ point that innovation will ultimately be the biggest growth driver .
“ The question is , who do we want to be moving forward ? QuickSpin is a great brand for us , but we can ’ t be successful making all QuickSpin games . There were times when we thought , ‘ Let ’ s try this , let ’ s try that .’ Nothing really stuck . But now the Raptor cabinet and the successes that we ’ re seeing early on are really giving us that new identity . It ’ s not a rebranding . It ’ s a repositioning , and building upon the strong foundation that was already here .”
The Local Touch
Perhaps the biggest overall change in Ainsworth ’ s philosophy has been to rethink the development pipeline . To do so , the company has leaned into a new directive for its studios , to try and craft games specifically for their local markets .
With locations in Las Vegas , Reno , Austin , South Carolina , Sydney , Australia and Monterrey , Mexico , those teams will now double down on those demographics and fine-tune mechanics rather than develop base games that are launched universally .
“ We ’ re regionalizing , where we ’ re focusing and we look at our development teams now for a particular region ,” Hunsberger explains . “ So , the development teams here in North America are focused on being experts on what ’ s
resonating in that market , and Australia has their development teams focused on games for their market , and so on .
“ Each market is a bit different , and for a company of our size , it ’ s difficult to make it a one-size-fits-all . We ’ re very focused on studying the market , doing our research , ensuring that what we ’ re developing fits into what players are playing today and what they understand .”
Upon hearing the new directive , Kruczynski says this type of ideology was “ a shock ” in the sense that he ’ d never seen anything like it in his career to that point . But for where the company sits now , he says , it makes sense to try and make the most of each game without unlimited resources , and regional tweaks are a big part of that . Using baseball as an analogy , he says Ainsworth ’ s average has to be closer to . 400 than . 250 .
And while it would seem that having the teams focus more on their own markets would negatively impact collaboration , Kruczynski says it ’ s actually the opposite , in the sense that the studios need to be able to take cues from each other and work out ways to make small changes that could better serve various environments , again tying back to the idea of maximizing the available resources .
“ We can ’ t be carpet-bombing our games all over the place and hope they stick ,” he explains . “ We have to be more focused , more strategic , and make smarter decisions . Now , if a game does well from the studio in Monterrey , the North American team will look at that and say , ‘ Okay , what can we take from here ?’ It really puts the onus on studio heads to communicate with each other . We have to work together and also cheer each other on . That ’ s going to be the challenge , but I think it ’ s the right move for us .”
On the technical side , the company ’ s new Unity platform also allows for cross-porting at a much faster rate than ever before , shortening the development timeline and allowing the company to capitalize on games that perform well in one vertical and transfer them to others in a timely manner .
“ Any game we develop , whether it ’ s in Australia , Reno , South Carolina , Mexico , when it ’ s on that Unity platform , it can go right over to HHR and Class II ,” Kruczynski explains . “ There is no porting ; as soon as we put that out in Class III , Class II and HHR will have it a month or two later . I think that ’ s one of our biggest developments as a company for this year .”
DECEMBER 2024 www . ggbmagazine . com 15