Pulse

Anaxi: roadmapping is a combination of science and art

By William - 26 April 2024

Anaxi’s Josh Morris, SVP Product & Technology, iGaming, discusses the data points and factors considered during the content roadmapping process.

As a new online division within Aristocrat, to what extent is the land-based business involved in creating Anaxi’s content roadmap? How involved is the Aristocrat team in sharing insights and talking through the design elements of its greatest games?

Our teams, across business units here at Aristocrat Leisure, have a very strong and collaborative relationship to ensure successful launches of our games across all channels.

We work especially closely with our land-based teams in Aristocrat Gaming to understand how land-based titles are performing and collaborate with each individual studio to align on what gameplay elements resonate with players to help our strategic teams and studios develop the best iGaming portfolio possible.

How is Anaxi staying connected to the heritage and the history of classic Aristocrat games being translated into digital formats? Are any of the original assets usable or do they need remastering or remaking entirely for the smaller screen?

It’s extremely important to us at Anaxi to stay true to the nature of the Aristocrat Gaming IP when translating a title into an online version. Our studios work in unison to ensure the gameplay being developed is not only recognisable to the player, but that the elements they know and love are recreated seamlessly into the palm of their hands.

That includes a combination of both utilisation of original assets and remaking of assets optimised for the digital experience – our ultimate goal is to provide a seamless experience of great, entertaining Aristocrat content now in real money gaming.

What ideas and concepts is Anaxi exploring to expand upon Aristocrat’s popular land-based titles as an online player proposition? What’s the strategy for building up game brand awareness in the online casino space?

Since its launch over the summer, Buffalo Classic has been performing tremendously – even ranking the number one online title in the US in recent Eilers reports. Feedback like that is a great indicator for us in terms of understanding our customers’ appetite to promote games, overall game performance, and resonation across markets.

We’ve recently launched Buffalo Gold and are continuing to roll out titles in the Buffalo family. Beyond Buffalo, we also have seen success with other titles like Timberwolf and Wicked Winnings II, both timeless classics within the Aristocrat portfolio – proving that the appetite for our great content in the online space exists. We look forward to continuing to rollout top-performing deep portfolio over the next few years.

How do you anticipate the roadmapping process will evolve once the business has exhausted Aristocrat’s library of most popular titles?

There’s a lot of IP to get through before we reach that point (ha!), and with new Aristocrat titles continuously being built with continued success in the market, I’m not sure we can say we’ll ever truly “exhaust” the Aristocrat titles.

However, innovation is at the heart of what we do and we are always looking at what the next best thing can be to ensure our players are being offered fresh new game concepts to play. We have exciting things in the studio currently, but you’ll have to stay tuned on that.

What data points is Anaxi factoring into the roadmapping process at this early stage, and what metrics are given greatest weight?

This is a combination of science and art, taking into consideration the market and player trends and preferences, the raw performance of the overall Aristocrat portfolio across all channels, both on a global and regional level, and the iGaming trends that exist across different regulated markets… to name a few.

These data points are then analysed by our extremely talented and successful studios and technology teams to build a content roadmap optimised for the player. It’s early days for us but we feel that our learnings to date are helping us to optimise our roadmap choices and we feel super confident in the road ahead.

What flexibility does Anaxi have to change the roadmaps of its studios based on the real-world data the company receives from operators on live game performance?

Our product and studio teams have a constant pulse on the market informed by data, and they challenge themselves and each other to continue to elevate the product and portfolio for what the players want and the market needs.

That said, we are nothing without our customers and we work closely to understand how games resonate with players and any learnings we can take for future roadmap planning.

As operators agreements get signed and more data flows in, how do you anticipate Anaxi’s content roadmapping will change?

The more insights the better! Any deeper understanding of how players are engaging with our content only helps set us to enhance our roadmaps in the future. Our operators have been tremendous partners so far and we value all they do to ensure they’re offering the best entertainment experience possible to their players.

Working with customers to ensure we are pushing the boundaries of entertainment is something that will indeed factor increasingly into our roadmap planning moving forward.

Finally, what can you reveal about Anaxi’s upcoming content roadmap?

We have a lot of player favourites launching into the market this year. What I can say is… you won’t be disappointed!