Dragon Train Chi Lin Wins will disappear from US retail and online casinos on Wednesday, as that it the deadline for Light & Wonder (LNW) to comply with a preliminary injunction ordering it to withdraw the product from the market. The company had initially intended to appeal the order but dropped its objections.
The online version of Dragon Train has been exclusively available in the US at BetMGM Casino. As of October 21, the game remains available to BetMGM players, although it no longer features prominently in the casino lobby. LNW’s latest court filing clarifies that it intends to withdraw Dragon Train “in-person and online.”
That means that BetMGM players who have been enjoying the game have only today and tomorrow to get their spins in before the game disappears on October 23. The free-to-play version has already been removed from social casinos.
Although LNW is no longer appealing the preliminary injunction, it will continue to fight the underlying lawsuit. That federal case was brought against LNW by rival company Aristocrat Gaming, which says LNW stole the mathematical calculations for its similar game Dragon Link. A preliminary injunction such as the one the Nevada court ordered against LNW is an exceptional remedy. However, Judge Gloria M. Navarro felt there was a sufficiently incriminating paper trail to warrant it. Game mathematician Emma Charles, who LNW dismissed from her position in light of the suit, allegedly circulated documents within LNW that matched the work she’d done for Aristocrat years earlier, including details like the files’ creation dates.
The good news for Dragon Train players is that LNW says it will bring the game back with new math. The game’s visuals and core mechanics will remain unchanged, but there’s no indication of how long the re-development and re-licensing will take.
Light & Wonder Needs More Time for Full Compliance
Although LNW is no longer fighting the preliminary injunction, it has asked for more time to comply with certain aspects. That won’t affect its timeline for pulling the game from the market. It says it has already made preparations to pull the game from the market and isn’t seeking any relief from that portion of the injunction.
What is causing delays for LNW is the requirement to purge all traces of the allegedly offending math from its internal systems. Its emergency motion for partial modification of the preliminary injunction states that it has retained outside help to “search for, secure, and account for responsive materials within the company.”
In the context of this case, the phrase “responsive materials” refers to Aristocrat’s alleged trade secrets. LNW says that it has retained outside help in searching for any traces of such data but that the process is proving more complicated than anticipated.
Per LNW’s filing, the search spans over 25 servers and 47 file repositories in more than 10 countries worldwide. The company says it has 45 employees working full-time on the search in addition to the outside consultants, but that human hours aren’t the limiting factor. Rather, it says it will need at least a few extra days and potentially as long as two weeks due to the time the computer systems themselves require to process the queries.
Among other things, this process requires locating all instances of the Dragon Train math in backups and version histories of the game code.
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