Markus Antl, Director of Global Sales & Marketing, Greentube
Greentube has successfully extended established franchises such as Piggy Prizes, Cash Connection and Starlight Jackpots across multiple releases while retaining the features and familiarity players recognise.
Central to the strategy for evolving these brands is ensuring that they retain the core mechanics, visual identity and player familiarity that made them successful in the first place; characteristics that players recognise and trust.
Maintaining a balance between established and proven game elements and the introduction of new experiences is key to how we approach franchise development. We want players to immediately recognise the DNA of a franchise game, while giving each release its own identity through new features, themes and ways to interact with the core mechanics.
With Piggy Prizes games, for example, the Piggy Pots, Coin Collection and the character on the centre reel remain fundamental to the experience, giving each new release a familiar foundation.
Our new Piggy Prizes: Ghost of Gambini demonstrates how we build on a foundation without simply repeating what has come before. Established elements such as Magic Spins are retained while a new Lock & Spin experience, including Super Lock & Spin, triggered when the Ghost of Gambini feeds the Piggy Pots, is introduced.
It also adds a new frame system, where White Ghosts can upgrade frames from Bronze to Silver to Gold, while Gold Ghosts can place Gold frames directly, with these frames ultimately revealing cash values or jackpots.
Differing player expectations
Player expectations can differ significantly between Europe and North America. These regional preferences influence the way we develop and localise our game portfolio, with a focus on the particular mechanics or themes that resonate more strongly in one market than the other.
Regional nuance shapes almost every stage of our roadmap, from maths models to theme selection. Broadly, our content strategy currently leans more on globally proven game families like Piggy Prizes and Starlight Jackpots, with an ever-increasing share of our games created for localised markets where player appetite genuinely diverges.
North America is a good example of where this localisation matters. Mechanics such as lock and spin, three-pot structures and linked progressive jackpots have consistently proven successful, and Canadian players in particular respond to well-designed, transparent mechanics with strong feature depth and familiar formats built around engaging bonus structures.
This is also where omnichannel capability matters commercially. A franchise like Piggy Prizes can move between retail and digital environments while keeping its visual language and feature set consistent, retaining familiarity for players who have encountered the brand on a casino floor.
Balancing proven mechanics with innovation
This comes down to where the risk sits best, and cost plays a real part. Alternative formats and genuinely new concepts are always worth exploring, but this kind of innovation is also the most expensive route, so we are deliberate about when we take the risk. Extending a proven game family like Piggy Prizes lets the team focus on feature depth rather than re-proving the fundamentals.
Player data plays its biggest role earlier than people might expect. We use our social gaming platforms to gather player preference data and test new mechanics with the same audience that later converts to real-money play.
This gives us a lower-cost way to validate a new idea before deciding whether it earns a place in a flagship franchise or stands as something new. Overall, our content strategy blends innovation with familiarity rather than choosing one over the other release by release.
Land-based and online collaboration
The relationship with NOVOMATIC’s land-based business is a structural advantage that works in both directions. Mechanics and themes that prove themselves on the casino floor give us a head start on digital adaptations, because we already know which elements resonate before they reach an online reel set.
Our South African launch is a clear example. Titles like Book of Ra and Lucky Lady’s Charm already had strong recognition among land-based players, making their introduction online feel natural.
Piggy Prizes is a similar story, but in the opposite direction, moving successfully across that same boundary, proving that the flow works both ways, with the online and mobile know-how we have built at Greentube feeding back into NOVOMATIC’s wider business.
Prioritizing investment and resources
We prioritise around long-term franchise value. Land-based conversions and original online content both feed the same core game families, so they tend to be resourced together. Platform technology makes everything else move faster.
Innovation is something we are deliberate about keeping front and centre as we grow, particularly in newer regulated markets, backed by investment in local expertise. It is a smaller, protected slice of the portfolio, giving new ideas room to prove themselves without pressuring established franchises.
The coherence comes from measuring it all against the same long-term goal of sustained value for operators and players across multiple channels and markets.
SBC Summit, G2E Las Vegas and beyond
Piggy Prizes – Ghost of Gambini is our headline title for both shows; a deliberate choice that gives us a single, strong story to tell across two very different audiences.
At SBC Summit, the priority is to deepen relationships in our established European markets while showcasing the jackpot-driven content that has performed consistently well there, most notably the Starlight Jackpots, Cash Connection and Diamond Link series.
At G2E, it is about building on real momentum in North America, where Canada has been one of our top three growth markets over the past couple of years. And our Alberta entry is still fresh, alongside continued expansion across US regulated states.
Looking further out, we see genuine opportunity in newly regulating North American states and provinces, continued growth in South Africa following our recent operator launches there and sustained performance in established European and Latin American markets.
Tags: Greentube, NOVOMATIC, SBC Summit 2026, G2E Las Vegas 2026
