Light & Wonder

What the company does

Scientific Games spent decades as one of the largest suppliers of land-based slot machines and lottery systems before selling the lottery business and renaming itself Light & Wonder in 2022. The remaining company is organised around taking the same game intellectual property across three channels: the casino floor, online real money, and free-to-play social casino through SciPlay.

That cross-channel model is the strategic argument of the land-based suppliers generally. A slot brand that players recognise from a casino floor carries recognition online that a purely digital studio has to buy, and a title that performs in a social casino can be tested at scale before it is released for real money.

The company has also been involved in one of the industry's most consequential intellectual property disputes, over the origins of a popular slot mechanic, which is a reminder that in a sector where mechanics are copied quickly, provenance occasionally ends up in court.

Where this sits in the supply chain

The companies that design and build the games themselves, principally slots. They are paid a share of the revenue their games generate rather than a licence fee, which is why a studio's commercial fortunes depend on a small number of titles performing across many operators.

All companies filed under game studios