What is the main message you want to communicate about BTG at G2E about the company’s direction and future strategy? 

We’re a mechanic-first studio and we build outwards from the player. Ten years on from Bonanza and Megaways™, it’s a milestone worth celebrating, but for us an anniversary isn’t just about looking backward. Bonanza More Gold is about taking what made the original so enduring and pushing it forward, building on a game that still earns its place in a lobby a decade later, while giving players something new to discover. That’s really the philosophy behind BTG: understand what makes a game feel great spin by spin, then keep finding ways to advance that experience. 

Where that takes us next is fairly practical. We’re still investing in evergreen content, because a lobby needs its anchors as well as its new arrivals. We’re doing more hybrid development, bringing Megaways™ together with progressive architectures in the Megapots™ range so a familiar mechanic can carry a very different reward structure. And the Megaways™ licensing programme keeps giving other studios and operators the tools to build distinctive lobbies of their own, which frees us up to concentrate on the games only we can make. 

If people take one thing away from talking to us in Vegas, I’d want it to be that we’re still in the business of building new mechanics. 

Will BTG be promoting any new games, mechanics or innovations at G2E? 

Yes, and the timing has worked out well for us. Extra Chilli More Chilli lands at the end of September, so it’ll be about as fresh as a game can be by the time the doors open in Vegas. There’s a lot of new machinery in it.  

Every base game spin now carries a chance of firing a Chilli Bonus Respin, which awards one of four modifiers: Duplicate Wild, Increased Ways, a Double Multiplier that climbs with every reaction, or Chilli Wild. Three HOT Scatters put you into 10 Free Spins with a Chilli Bonus locked in, and every extra Scatter stacks another bonus on top, up to all four. We’ve also included a Free Spins Gamble wheel for players who want to push their luck before the feature even starts, and that sits alongside Power Play, Bonus Buy and up to 117,649 Megaways™. 

We’ll be talking about the rest of this year’s slate too. Monster Quest put a battling hero at the centre of a Megaways™ slot, and Fruit Merge Megapots™ took the merge mechanic that has carried casual mobile games for years and rebuilt it as an 88,000x slot. There’s more coming before the year is out as well. 

At the end of G2E, what would make you consider the event a success for Big Time Gaming? 

The conversations, mostly. G2E is one of the few weeks in the year when operators, licensing partners and distribution teams from every major market are all in the same building, so we tend to learn as much as we pitch. If we come away with a clearer read on what operators feel is missing from their lobbies heading into 2027, that alone pays for the trip. 

I’d also like to watch people play Extra Chilli More Chilli in person, because you can usually tell within a couple of minutes whether a feature is landing the way you designed it.  

And I’d want to see real movement on partnerships and exclusive windows for what’s coming next. Shows are where those relationships start, so success for us looks like a very full October diary. 

As player preferences continue to evolve, what elements of Megaways™ remain relevant today and what new expectations are emerging? 

What’s kept Megaways™ relevant is that the promise is visible. The reels change shape in front of you, the ways count updates on screen and you can see exactly how much a spin is carrying before it resolves. That kind of legibility is rare in slot design. It also scales, because Megaways™ has carried cluster maths, jackpot systems, cascades and licensed IP without ever losing its identity, and very few mechanics that reach ten years old can say the same. 

Expectations around it have moved on, though. Players are far more sophisticated than they were a decade ago and they’ll work through dozens of high-volatility titles in a week, so a strong paytable figure doesn’t hold anyone’s attention for long by itself. Pacing does. How the potential gets teased out across a session, where it stalls, when it finally lands. 

Players also want progression they can feel and believe they’ve earned, instead of being moved from one bonus to the next because the design ran out of road. And they expect all of that to work as well on a phone as it does anywhere else. Mobile-first stopped being a feature a long time ago. 

Following the success of Megaways™, how does BTG approach creating the next generation of game mechanics, and what qualities does an innovation need to have to be a success? 

We start with how the player should feel and work outwards from there. The ceiling comes later. If you begin with a target multiplier and reverse-engineer the game to reach it, you usually end up with something nobody remembers playing. 

As for what makes a mechanic work, there are a few things I’d insist on. It has to be graspable, because if a player can’t follow what’s happening within a spin or two, then it doesn’t matter how clever the idea is underneath. The maths has to be robust, since that’s what lets a mechanic survive across different markets, stake levels and volatility profiles.  

The escalation has to feel organic. Megaclusters™ is the example I always use: the grid grows with every win and unlocks modifiers as it goes, so the player feels the game intensifying in real time. And it needs enough flexibility to carry different themes and different maths; otherwise, what you’ve actually built is one good game. That’s the bar we’re setting ourselves at the moment, because there’s a new mechanic in development for the next ten years. Watch this space.