The word powerhouse only barely captures the magnitude of what started in 2006 with a gang of ten game developers in Stockholm. Just over a decade later, NYX Interactive, which merged in 2011 with NextGen to form the NYX Gaming Group, is now a publicly traded company with global reach, operating gaming studios in Montreal, Stockholm and Sydney, while newly acquired BetDigital expands its market presence in the UK. The company operates an unmatched distribution network with a top-drawer portfolio of titles which comprises one of the industry’s leading offerings, arguably its largest. At the core of the NYX success story is technological creativity on the backend. Merge partner NextGen may not be a household name to the average player, but its development team has been a power behind the development of industry-changing platforms as Microgaming Quickfire and a partner to some of the world’s biggest and most successful casinos such as William Hill and 888. NextGen’s core expertise is in pokies, innovating now-familiar gameplay enhancements such as ‘SuperBet’, ‘Slide-a-Wild’, and ‘Up Wild’. NYX has also been an innovator in moving the industry away from Flash and into the more universally mobile-device friendly HTML5 standard. NYX Move is a mobile gaming platform that lets pokies be played seamlessly on virtually any smartphone or tablet, responsively adapting the desktop/laptop content to the smaller touch-screen.
How Openness Unlocked the Gates of Growth
A key to NYX’s success has been the company’s OPS™ (Open Platform System) and OGS™ (Open Gaming System), which allow online casinos to take advantage of top-flight content developed by game suppliers around the world, acknowledged to be the market-leading gaming platform. From its own studios and broad partner network of innovative third party suppliers, the open framework and developer network lets NYX offer customers the world’s widest portfolio of content. The open framework combines, as of 2017, the creative efforts of 4 in-house game studios and 30 third-party studios to produce more than 600 games. Online casinos which deal with pokies, poker, bingo and sportsbook have easy access to this unmatched aggregation engine, facilitating easy integration and distribution of their products on their own sites. Openness also characterises the company’s foray into the world of sports. NYX’s award-winning sports betting division, OpenBet, has become the top sportsbook operator in the world, both in terms of size and in terms of betting data performance. In 2016, the sportsbook processed more than two billion bets, processing 68,000 bets-per-minute at the 2017 Grand National, smashing world records to smithereens.
A Marvelous Empire of Casino and Betting Titles
To infinitely scroll through the vast collection of games on the NYX website is a humbling experience. Where shall we begin?
- branded NYX pokies from comic book and Hollywood franchises Marvel and DC Warner Bros, featuring The Hulk, Batmen, Spiderman, and Captain America and many other superheroes.
- Bonus-rich and multiple-laden pokies like The Amsterdam Masterplan, Las Vegas Fever, The Codfather, Merlin’s Millions, Mad Mad Monkey, and Doctor Love. And don’t forget Medusa, Dolphin Reef, Foxin’ Wins, 300 Shields, and The Snake Charmer.
- NYX Bingo offers a robust platform for 75- and 95-ball bingo
- OpenBet is one of the world’s top sportsbook platforms
As familiar and cutting edge titles fly by, one can’t help but wonder how the heck one company can ingest, manage, and then distribute so much top-quality content. With all this quantity and diversity, you may ask, how do they ensure quality and consistency across the portfolio? The company itself credits maths and psychology with providing its winning formula, focusing on the mathematical nuances of the quality and distribution of prizes to create more excitement sooner. NYX prides itself on granting players insight into the overall game concept dynamics so that the play experience is from the start positive and engaging while incentivizing loyalty and continuous play. Another emphasis is on art direction, quality sound and animation, especially when rewarding wins and presenting those addictive bonus games, multiples, scatters and wilds.
Bottom Line
The NYX Gaming Group story is a kind of gaming Cinderella story in which a bunch of developers merged and morphed into a publicly traded titan by smart business and strong technology. But for players and bettors, the bottom line is that the open approach has paid off big-time in the gaming experience, giving game-lovers an unmatched freedom of choice and quality assurance, and sports lovers the fastest and most wide ranging betting platform on the planet. What stands out with NYX is the fact that you can find so many independent studios developing on the open platform, creating a win-win situation that encourages innovation, creativity and competition which inevitably results in better games and better results. A rising tide raises all ships: the NYX commitment to openness and freedom has leveled the playing field and provided a path for even little guys to ride quality of play and freedom of choice to greatness. And that is what we call, huge.