Microgaming launches EmotiCoins online slot

The game has five reels, 30 paylines and it was born from an idea pitched by two members of staff, Anna McChesney and Rob Mercer, at the Microgaming Idea Factory, whoch is a staff-powered innovation initiative that won The Spark Award 2017.

Anna McChesney, PR Manager for Microgaming, said: "As a marketer, to me the use of emoticons in social media and communication is fascinating; they have essentially become a universal language! 92% of the world’s online population use emoticons, so developing a themed game would automatically target the demographic of our operators’ players.”

First submitted to the Idea Factory contest in June 2016, Anna and Rob highlighted the use of emoticons in today’s world. One such use is highlighted by the fact that including emoticons in Facebook posts can increase the number of likes by 57%.

Microgaming claims the themed slot idea gained the sponsorship of the Business Intelligence team from an early stage, helping the duo refine EmotiCoins by suggesting game features that were most likely to be successful, based on the typical emoticon user. Using these insights, Anna and Rob pitched a unique set of emoticons alongside the feature sets to complement the game’s theme at their final pitch to the Decision Panel (a selection of senior executives) in November.

EmotiCoins was subsequently announced at the staff Christmas party in December 2016 as one of five winning ideas out of the 27 put forward, and its journey from prototype to reality was kick started. Just one month later, one of Microgaming’s game development teams fully embraced the game and began to bring the online slot to life.

Emoticons is currently live with Microgaming and Quickfire operators on desktop and mobile.

The Microgaming Idea Factory was spearheaded by Lydia Barbara, Head of Innovation Strategy at Microgaming. "We are super excited to be taking live the first game concept driven from the Idea Factory by staff members who would ordinarily not be involved in game conception.”

Source: GMB