The Creative Equation

Jamie, you joined IGT in 2025 to establish Viva Studio in Las Vegas, and little more than a year later been announced as IGT’s next Chief Studios Officer. What did you see when you arrived that convinced you there was an opportunity to rethink how IGT develops games?

When I arrived, the studios were operating a little like factories and were very Product Management led. The biggest opportunity for the business was bringing ownership back into the studios and enable our designers to better understand the business decisions behind the games they were creating. They shouldn’t feel as though they are simply making another game. They need to understand what it takes to create a great game that will also perform commercially. That is what we have been leaning into – giving the studios greater ownership and encouraging our designers to think more broadly about what makes a successful product.

CEO Hector Fernandez has put content at the centre of IGT’s “5 Cs.” From your perspective, what does IGT’s content transformation involve?

One of our biggest areas of focus is franchises and brands. I think there has been a missed opportunity around some of the legacy brands that IGT has built over many years but perhaps hasn’t leaned into enough. We want to build a stronger portfolio around franchises, brands and mechanics that we know resonate with players. At the same time, we are reducing the overall number of games and focusing our resources on the right products. We are already starting to see an improvement in performance and consistency from doing that. It is about concentrating on fewer things and making those things better.

You’ve spent two decades in gaming and began your career on the creative side. What is your own philosophy on creating a successful casino game?

It is always a combination of things coming together. One area where I don’t think we have focused enough historically is production value and the overall entertainment factor, particularly audio. Audio is an area where I think we can improve significantly. You should be able to close your eyes, listen to a game and know exactly what you are playing. We haven’t always achieved that, so we are beginning to invest more heavily in that area.

Math is obviously fundamental and we have some incredibly strong mathematicians. The question is how we combine that with the right amount of innovation. We are looking closely at the incremental innovations that can make a game stand out while retaining the elements players understand and enjoy.

Viva Studio was deliberately established with a different process and culture. What did you want to do differently there, and what can you now take from Viva into the wider studio organisation?

I am a big believer in using people according to their talents rather than shoehorning them into predefined roles. Historically, you might have had an artist who also happened to animate. We are now bringing in people who are specifically great animators and empowering them to use that expertise to increase the production value of our games. That was very much the approach with Viva. Rather than having only a few people responsible for a game, we brought together the best talent for each element and created a genuine team around the product. You have more voices contributing, and I believe that makes the final game stronger. It is an approach I have used previously and seen succeed. When you allow people to work to their strengths, you also get more passion from them.

Viva’s first game, King Khufu, became one of the strongest-performing new core video games in the market. What did its performance tell you about the approach you had taken?

King Khufu was an interesting project because when game designer John Kearns and I came into IGT, one of the first questions was simply: how do we make a game here? We needed a project that allowed us to learn while moving quickly because the studio also had to start earning its place. It made sense to begin with a math model that we already knew was strong. Jumanji had been performing well, but it hadn’t achieved the level of penetration that we thought it could, so bringing that math into the core space made a lot of sense.

We then completely changed the production value around it. Obviously, King Khufu has an entirely different theme, but we also changed the animation, the feeling, the sound and the orchestration of the pots. Although the underlying math has its origins in Jumanji, we changed a lot around the experience to give King Khufu a different energy. The way the pots behave, for example, was designed to make the player feel something different. The success of the game validated a lot of those decisions.

IGT has talked about using AI to amplify and accelerate game design across IGT and Everi. Where is AI already making a difference?

We are always going to need humans. For me, the opportunity with AI is about how we can do things faster and make the development process less painful. We are investing in the very early stages of development. How do we prototype ideas faster? How do we discard ideas that aren’t working more quickly? We want that iteration cycle to become really fast.

We are using AI for early concepts and prototyping so that we can begin playing with ideas before the full development teams even touch them. That allows us to iterate very quickly before moving something into full production. Teams are also building tools that make their individual processes faster, which ultimately helps us improve time to market.

Another area we’re investigating is how AI can accelerate the process of moving a game from one cabinet to another or adapting it for different markets.

Has there been concern among creative teams that AI could ultimately threaten some of those roles?

There was some resistance initially. Adoption has been a process over the last year. One thing we introduced was knowledge-sharing sessions every couple of months. We would have five or six volunteers from different studios and different parts of the world explain how they were using AI and demonstrate what it was doing for them. Once we started doing that, people began saying, “That could make my job easier.” Adoption then started spreading across the organisation.

Now we have people volunteering to participate in the next session and experimenting with different applications themselves. It has been a really positive reaction. People needed to see that this wasn’t about replacing them. It was about making their jobs faster and easier.

How do you manage that experimentation across such a large organisation?

IGT has established an AI Centre of Excellence specifically for the studios. Leaders within the studio organisation were identified who were particularly passionate about advancing our use of AI and brought those experts together as a team. When people elsewhere experiment with different tools, they can bring them to this group. The team evaluates whether something is genuinely the best tool, whether it is efficient and whether it makes sense for the organisation. If it does, we can then develop an adoption strategy and roll it out more broadly across the studios.

Next year, you will be responsible for a global studio organisation of more than 1,200 people. You’ve talked about empowering and rewarding creative talent. What does that mean in practice?

Rewarding people properly is extremely important. Performance is a major motivator for designers, and if their games perform on the floor, we need to make sure we recognise that appropriately. We are currently looking at our incentive programme. We already have a good programme, but we’re making some changes to focus it more closely on the things we want to prioritise.

Between IGT and Everi there is a much broader collection of studios and creative talent. How do you encourage greater collaboration without losing the identities that made individual studios successful?

I’ve been visiting the different teams and they all have their own ways of working. I don’t believe there is only one correct way to operate a studio, and I don’t want to impose exactly the same model everywhere. Again, I believe in using people according to their talents, and that will look different from one studio to another.

One change I am encouraging impacts some of our larger studios. Within those studios, we are creating smaller pods of people who work together consistently. It allows those individuals to really understand one another and develop their own ways of working, which can make the process faster. It also creates ownership. The designer becomes responsible for that particular product and team, and I believe that ownership will make us stronger.

Wheel of Fortune now has three decades of history in casino gaming. How do you continue evolving a brand of that scale without losing what made it successful?

This is a major focus for us. Wheel of Fortune is such a significant brand with 30 years of history, so the question is how we reinvent it and bring in a new player base while retaining what people recognise about it. Wheel of Fortune Sunny Money is one example. Sony had run a promotion involving cartoon dollar bills, and we saw an opportunity to create a game around that. It has a completely new visual approach with a cartoon style and triple pots, incorporating elements that players are currently looking for, but still within Wheel of Fortune.

We are trying to bridge the gap between trends we are seeing in the industry and the established Wheel of Fortune brand. That doesn’t mean every Wheel of Fortune game will go in that direction. We want to have a handful of games where we are prepared to take a risk and see whether we can reach different players.

IGT has enormous reach across both land-based and digital gaming. How early in the creative process are you now thinking about whether an idea can work across both environments?

Historically, the two sides have been very siloed. We are trying to change that. We’ve created a new stage-gate process around game development and have started inviting the digital team into our concept pitches. They can now see what the studios are pitching at a very early stage and decide whether something could also be right for their roadmap. They can then begin collaborating with the studio during the production cycle, taking assets and starting to work on the digital version. It may ultimately be slightly different depending upon the environment, but we are trying to bring those processes much closer together.

We’re still relatively early in that journey, so there is more work to do, but there are a lot more opportunities than we have taken advantage of historically.

The volume of content reaching casino floors continues to increase. Does that change your definition of success?

Absolutely, and it is one of the reasons we’re leaning more heavily into franchises and IP while producing fewer games. Historically, we were probably the manufacturer making the most games every year.
That approach wasn’t working for us because too often a new release could simply look like another game. We’re trying to create much greater focus. Rather than spreading people across a very large number of products, we can put more people onto an individual game and potentially accelerate its development while also increasing its quality.

Does that change the way you test games with operators before a wider rollout?

We’ve changed that process as well. We previously had a very extensive test-bank programme across the United States. It helped us understand whether a game was performing and gave us a mechanism for stopping a product if it wasn’t working. The problem was the amount of time it could take a game to get through that process. It could take six to nine months to reach the target we were looking for, and we felt that delay was ultimately hurting our games more than helping them.

We are still testing and still have partnerships with certain casinos, but we’ve shortened that timeframe to around 30 days. We have specific casinos where we can place games and obtain early performance data, but we’re no longer preventing the sales team from selling those games while that process takes place. It gives us the information we need without creating the same delay in getting the product into the market.

You’ve gone from establishing a single new studio to preparing to take responsibility for IGT’s entire studio organisation. What will you want operators to notice about IGT’s games under your leadership?

I want them to notice the improvement in the quality of the games we’re making. I think they will already have started seeing some of that this year. There are some really encouraging green shoots across the products we’re showing at G2E, and I believe that every year from here the portfolio is going to get stronger.

Ultimately, I also want the people creating those games to have greater visibility. I want faces associated with our games. I want our designers to become known for what they create. That creates ownership.
When someone can say, “That’s my game,” and you can see their personality and passion in the product, that’s exactly what I want to encourage.