Welcome! We're speaking with Aleksandar Dašić, the Head of Affiliate Marketing at Bragg Gaming—a company known for creating popular casino games enjoyed by players worldwide.
If you're into slots, chances are you've tried some of Bragg Gaming’s biggest hits. But what exactly makes certain games stand out and become player favorites?
Let's talk to Aleksandar and learn about Bragg Gaming’s top-performing slots, and player preferences, and maybe find out what's coming up next.
Let’s start with the fans’ favorites — what are currently the top most popular slots from Bragg Gaming?
When it comes to our timeless classics that still see plenty of spins and generate a lot of excitement among players, it’s undoubtedly Dreamy Genie and Fairy Dust, both by Atomic Slot Lab. A very close second comes games from the Connect & Collect series that revolve around the eponymous super-feature, conceived, developed, and implemented by the same Vegas-based studio. They include titles such as Cai Fu Emperor Ways, 7 Shields of Fortune, both from 2023 but still going strong, and recently, Almighty Pegasus, too. This one is the latest release from the series, and it’s performing brilliantly: players simply can’t get enough of it!
What do you think makes them stand out?
For Dreamy Genie and Fairy Dust, it’s their time-proven features and mechanics that are implemented very well and synergize with their themes quite nicely. Dreamy Genie has a wheel feature that echoes the wish-granting powers of a genie and a match-three reveal feature with jackpots. On top of that, game visuals are vibrant & sophisticated, the music and sounds perfectly match the theme, and the mechanics maintain a healthy balance between relatively frequent triggers and captivating unpredictability.
Fairy Dust, on the other hand, excites with an upcoming symbol feed that shows what bonuses the player could win in the next few spins, a sort of built-in retention mechanic. This feature motivates players to actively adapt their approach to the game and effectively adds a unique strategic layer rarely seen in slots. What’s more, the settings of both games are rather uncommon, which helps them stand out from a myriad of games with cliché themes, and fittingly represent the magical experience of slot gaming.
Speaking of Almighty Pegasus, its stunning visuals are complemented by an engaging set of mechanics included within the Connect & Collect super-feature. Connect & Collect offers players a puzzle-like mechanic of creating paths of symbols toward game bonuses, lets them visually follow feature progression, and plays into the pleasure we experience when we see things completed and falling into place. Watching symbols create these paths is highly satisfying and motivating at the same time, and rewards always feel within reach, just one spin away.
The success of these titles has inspired us to craft more games based on this engaging feature, as it’s highly flexible and able to include a wide selection of subfeatures and mechanics, making each game different but still familiar and easy to get into. Stay tuned for more releases like this: we have many more aces up our sleeves.
Do you see any common features or mechanics in these top-performing games that players seem to love (e.g., free spins, bonus buys, multipliers)?
We do, but they are not universal or global. Different regions, even different countries, have different tastes and preferences. Longer and layered bonuses are all the rage in Scandinavia, Central Europe seems to prefer variations of the hold and respin feature, and Brazilian players like to opt for modern steppers with lots of action. All our top performers are easy to get into, allowing new players to pick them up and get to love them within a few spins, while a vast majority of our games include a buy bonus option as well, which appeals to a more demanding and ambitious subset of players.
80% of success comes from knowing your players and understanding trends and specific market preferences. 20%, on the other hand, which is a smaller but not less important percentage, is about the pioneering work of pushing boundaries. We pride ourselves on our ability to innovate and create brand-new features, too, as was the case with Connect & Collect.
How do you gather player feedback or data to understand which games are resonating the most?
We employ a 360° data collection approach, which means that we gather insights from multiple sources. Our position as one of the strongest tech providers in the industry allows us to track and collect anonymized player behavior data, such as in-game activity and game session dynamics, giving us a clear advantage over our competitors who don’t. These raw data insights influence the development of both custom and off-the-shelf tools that make up our Fuze™ engagement and gamification toolset. With the increase in in-game activity generated by Fuze™, we can learn even more about player tastes and behaviors, which in turn allows us not only to provide a much better content experience but also to implement Responsible Gaming measures to protect players and offer a safe gaming environment.
As for other data sources, these include operator feedback from partners in various regions of the world, affiliate feedback about current trends and preferences, and finally streaming platform chat logs and community forum conversations about game experience from players first-hand. We can’t overstate the importance of these last two sources: game popularity among players is often fueled by affiliates and streamers. All this may seem an overwhelming stream of data to consider, but we are increasingly leveraging AI and our proprietary smart analytics tools to interpret the data and act on these insights.
Can you share any surprising trends in player preferences — for example, are classic slots making a comeback, or is it all about innovation?
Both. First, trends in any scene, slot scene included, are usually quite cyclical, and comebacks are not that uncommon. You just need to give them a decade or two, nowadays even less than that, and something that maybe seems out of fashion will eventually return big-time. A good example is stepper slots that became somewhat neglected with the advent of 5x3 grids. They never completely disappeared, though, and they are now seeing a comeback in the online environment, mostly thanks to the hybridization of their classic format with contemporary mechanics that weren’t possible on mechanical and early digital machines.
Second, one of our strengths is in the diversity of our content offering that we actively foster as it makes our game portfolio time-proof and resistant to changing trends and preferences. In other words, whatever the current hype is, we have games for that. To paraphrase Isaac Newton, we can see further and consequently offer better content because we are standing on the shoulders of industry giants. By analogy, our Atomic Slot Lab studio, for example, can craft superior online slots because it is built on the vast experience of Wild Streak Gaming, another Bragg’s Vegas-based studio renowned for its land-based hits. As I’ve mentioned earlier, our top performers include both classic features and novelty innovations, and as such, they can show a strong, steady, and reliable performance even with the quickly shifting trends in slot gaming.
How important are game themes and visual design compared to gameplay features when it comes to popularity?
Both can contribute to the popularity of a given game, but it all boils down to how they work together, how gameplay features are implemented to reflect the theme, and how they engage the player regardless of the game's theme. That said, even a visually unappealing game can perform very well and have a loyal players if it tickles the gaming bone in the right way.
However, in the contemporary slots scene, in which there’s a wide variety of games and providers to choose from, players and operators are having a hard time deciding which games would be the best fit for them. This is where the visual design and theme come in handy: they can make a game stand out from the rest and give it a chance to prove itself with its compelling gameplay and ability to maintain player interest. Put another way, if it’s the theme that attracts the player at first, it is the gameplay that will make them come back to the game.
Are there any Bragg Gaming titles that started slow but later became hits with players? What changed?
We do have a few, albeit not very representative, examples of this, such as Fairy Dust and Jester’s Vegas Experience. They saw a significant uptick later on and generated formidable results for quite a while, but their success stems mostly from their inclusion with a major operator at a later time. Operator exposure plays a key role here: a game needs visibility to succeed. What changed here is simply their availability and visibility to the players who can recognize a good game when they see one
An important factor of change in the lifetime and performance of a game is the industry itself, which is experiencing a hyperproduction of slot games. The sheer number and abundance of titles, combined with increasingly shorter trend cycles that are eating into game lifetimes, make it harder for good games to get the attention they deserve. Players tend to jump from one game to the next quicker, which does help with the games’ chances of being recognized as good, but the players’ attention span is getting shorter and shallower. This makes studios less and less likely to establish a huge slot hit of the likes of Starburst and Book of Ra. Instead, a wider selection of games will be recognized as hits, but their impact will be less than that of the hits that preceded them. Simply put, there will still be hits, just more of them and not as big as before.
There are several things studios can do to boost their game performance and extend their lifetime. GAMOMAT, for example, one of our close partner studios, excels in reusing their successful IP with a new feature, as it did with the Flaming Link series. This approach attracts new players to their games and draws back regulars looking for a new experience.
At Bragg, we support our releases post-launch in two ways: with bespoke promotions for individual operators and with Fuze™. The latter is a powerful set of engagement and gamification tools that delights players with quests, tournaments, and AI-based recommendations, to name just a few. It efficiently extends game lifetimes, boosts player acquisition, conversion, and retention, and offers players an enhanced gaming experience they gladly return to. This means that our games are less volatile performance-wise, i.e., they perform better in all lifetime phases and deliver constantly reliable results across the board. For this reason, our games are generally quite robust in the sense that they have a longer retention curve and a lower performance drop rate.
Finally, are there any upcoming releases that you believe have the potential to become the next fan favorites? Give us a little teaser!
Absolutely! We’re looking forward to the upcoming release of Mighty Mountain by Indigo Magic, our Europe-based studio with a knack for daring and innovative approaches. In this case, the studio was inspired by the currently in-vogue triple pots games, such as Panda Pots by Atomic Slot Lab, and will deliver a mature version of the feature without the teething pains of their predecessors from our competition. Mighty Mountain is scheduled for release on May 29, and we can confidently say that, especially with our rich, diverse, and compelling Q2 games roadmap, we’re in for a hot slot gaming summer.
That wraps up our interview. Many thanks to Aleksandar Dašić and Bragg Gaming for sharing these insights with us. We appreciate your time and look forward to seeing more exciting slots from your team in the future.
Thanks again, and good luck!
About the Expert:
- Interviewed Person: Aleksandar Dašić (LinkedIn)
- Company: Bragg Gaming
- Position: Head of Affiliate Marketing
- Experience in industry since: 2016
