Light & Wonder’s Dragon Train slot might temporarily disappear from US retail and online casinos, but it won’t be gone long, the company revealed yesterday. In a video statement to investors on Oct. 4, LNW President and CEO Matt Wilson assured investors that the impact of temporarily pulling the game from the US market would be minimal.
Last week, a federal court in Nevada ordered LNW to cease distributing the game in the US. Judge Gloria M. Navarro found what she called credible evidence that an LNW game mathematician, Emma Charles, had reused spreadsheets she originally created for Aristocrat Gaming in 2013 for a similar game, Dragon Link. In his statement, Wilson confirmed that Charles has been dismissed from her position at LNW.
Dragon Train Chi Lin Wins, the first online title in the series, is exclusively available at BetMGM Casino. Although it is no longer placed front-and-center in the lobby, it remains available and in the site’s top 10 games. It’s unclear whether the injunction will force LNW to ask BetMGM to remove the game, but Wilson’s statement suggests that even if it does disappear, it will soon be back in “2.0” form.
According to Wilson, only the details of the game’s math will have to change, after which the game can be re-released. He said:
It’s a very high priority for us and we’re working quickly to get that out. We expect that Dragon Train will continue to be a franchise in our portfolio for many years to come.
What to Expect From a Dragon Train Reboot
The math underlying a modern slot machine is highly complicated. Game mathematicians use elaborate spreadsheets to calculate the payouts for every possible sequence of events in order to arrive at the game’s theoretical RTP.
Doing those calculations represents a significant part of the time investment to develop a game. In its suit, Aristocrat alleged that LNW took a shortcut by hiring Charles and allowing her to copy her own work on Dragon Link.
Wilson stressed that none of the other work that went into the game is in question:
There’s a lot of elements in this game that made it successful. There’s the Dragon Train secondary hold-and-respin feature, the art, the sounds, the animation and the brand. These things are not affected by the order.
The good news for players is that the complexity of slots means there’s more than one route to achieve a similar RTP and experience. From a legal perspective, what matters is the distribution of symbols on the reels and the work that went into establishing that distribution. What a player experiences, however, is only the payout frequency and volatility that results from the configuration.
LNW’s goal will presumably be to make Dragon Train 2.0 feel as much like the original as possible, with the differences all being “under the hood.” There might be a few more of some symbols than others, and the relative frequency of certain specific payouts might change, but chances are that players won’t even notice the difference.
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