Big Time Gaming and the Reinvention of the Max Win

As part of EE Magazine’s look at the studios doing something different, Big Time Gaming CEO Nik Robinson explains why the road towards a big win now matters as much as the figure waiting at the end of it – and how Fruit Merge Megapots™ turns a casual-gaming staple into an 88,000x slot mechanic.

Not many studios have made a habit of rewriting the rulebook quite like Big Time Gaming. The Sydney-based provider gave the industry Megaways and then watched half the sector license it, and that instinct for changing the shape of a game rather than dressing up an old one still runs through everything it creates. Ask CEO Nik Robinson where that energy is pointed in 2026, and the answer has very little to do with chasing a bigger headline number.

For most of the last decade, max win has been the figure studios led with, a number that represented how much ambition a game carried. Robinson thinks that number has quietly stopped doing the job.

“A big top-line multiplier still matters, but on its own it falls short now,” he says. “Players want the whole arc – the anticipation, the tension as it builds and the release when it finally lands. The number means far more when someone has felt the climb towards it rather than just reading it on a paytable.”

He puts the change down to a more sophisticated audience. Players now jump between dozens of high-volatility titles in a week, and a strong paytable figure on its own no longer holds their attention. What holds it is how that potential is paced out across a session, how it teases, stalls and then lands. For Robinson, the win is less a statistic to be advertised than an achievement to be earned.

That belief shapes how BTG builds their games from the very first step. Rather than fixing a final multiplier and reverse-engineering a game around it, the studio starts with the player’s emotional trajectory and works outward.

“We start with how the player should feel, spin by spin, long before we settle on a ceiling,” Robinson explains. “The maths, the visuals, the audio and the mechanics all have to pull in the same direction. If the path towards a win has been built with care, the win itself carries far more weight.”

The tools for that are familiar enough on paper – multipliers that ramp, multi-stage bonuses, layered features – but Robinson is wary of bolting them on for their own sake. The studio’s Megaclusters mechanic, where a compact grid swells with every win and unlocks fresh modifiers as it grows, is his preferred example of escalation that feels organic. The grid expanding is the player feeling the game intensify in real time. Progression only works, he argues, when the player senses a feature coming and feels they earned it, rather than being moved from one bonus to the next because the design ran out of road.

If the philosophy needs a proof point, BTG has just shipped one. Fruit Merge Megapots™ takes the merge mechanic that has carried casual mobile hits for years and rebuilds it for a Megapots slot, a crossover the studio reckons no one had meaningfully pulled off before.

The principle is simple to grasp and deliberately moreish. Land three matching fruits and they merge, climbing a ladder of progressively richer symbols, and even the smallest fruit at the bottom sits only four merges away from a Megapot symbol. Every merge combines the prizes already in play and then adds more on top, so a single chain can swing a round dramatically. The studio tuned the Hold and Spin feature to fire players into those chains, climbing the ladder in sequence, and each merge prises open reels that were previously locked, dragging more bonus symbols into the next spin. At the summit, the Megapots reach as high as 88,000 times the original stake.

It's a neat combination of the whole approach – the comfort of the familiar is wired up to deliver a payoff that feels genuinely modern. That, in the end, is what doing something different looks like at Big Time Gaming. They don't strive for novelty for its own sake, but they instead refuse to treat any part of a slot as settled, right down to the number everyone else still leads with. On Fruit Merge Megapots™, the studio is still more interested in the journey than the billboard figure at the end of it, and still convinced that is where the next generation of players will follow.