In defence of the familiar slot

There is constant pressure in the industry to explain what is new about every release. Sergiy Nilov, Game Producer, talks to us about why ICONIC21 built its Mythic Link series to feel familiar on purpose.

There's a certain pressure that comes with every release, and it has nothing to do with whether the game is actually any good – it's the pressure to have an answer ready when someone asks what's new about it. Reviewers want a headline feature and affiliates want a hook, and that births a worry that a game with no obvious novelty will get written off as filler before anyone's played it. I understand the instinct completely, but what I've come to believe, after enough of these cycles, is that it nudges studios towards decisions they'd be better off not making.

Players are often much more comfortable with familiarity than the industry gives them credit for, and novelty only creates value when it improves the experience. Watch what people actually return to and you tend to see the opposite, as the features that stick around are the ones anyone can pick up without being taught. Successful mechanics spread because players understand them and providers know there is demand for them.

That readability is the quality I think we consistently undervalue. Every new mechanic you add is really a small demand you're making of the player – learn this, and we'll make it worth the trouble. Now and again, that trade pays off, but much of the time it doesn't. Every additional rule asks the player to spend attention understanding the game. That can be worthwhile, but the additional complexity has to create enough value to justify the effort. When a complicated game underperforms, it is tempting to blame complexity. In reality, we rarely have enough information to know that with confidence.

When we started on Mythic Link, the defining decision was closer to a restraint than an ambition. The brief for Mythic Link came directly from the market. Our casino partners saw an experience that was not represented online and asked us to build around that opportunity. The important thing is not to keep the core untouchable. It is to decide consciously where the risk lives. If the mechanic is experimental, I want something else to feel familiar. If the visual direction is unusual, I may deliberately use gameplay I already trust.

Where we did give ourselves room to do something new, we kept it tightly bounded. In Monkey King the Free Spins round can itself set off the Hold & Win, so you end up with one feature nested inside another instead of two separate routes leading off the base game. Described in a spec sheet it sounds minor, but in gameplay it gives the bonus a second gear, and it explains itself – nobody has to be told that landing inside the round has carried them somewhere further along. That was the only test that mattered to us. Would it read instantly to someone who had never seen it before? Whether or not it was clever never really came into the conversation.

I don't want any of this to sound like an urge to play it safe, because that's a real trap of its own, and probably the more damaging one. A studio that only ever reproduces what already works ends up with a shelf of games nobody can tell apart. What I’m arguing for is judgement about where a new idea belongs — keeping enough of the experience familiar while choosing deliberately where to spend the risk.

Admittedly it isn't a fashionable thing to argue, when reinvention writes a better press release than refinement ever will. Not every release needs to answer the question ‘what have we invented?’ Sometimes the better question is ‘what demand are we satisfying, and where is the most useful place to take a risk?’