LAI Games brought a plethora of new product to the IAAPA Show in Florida last month, following a new direction in its strategy for developing games.
“We’ve based our strategy on product we can produce for ourselves in-house and through our own R&D team and strategic partnerships with a small number of good manufacturers from the Far East, in particular we’re working with Komuse,” said the company’s Steve Bryant (pictured right, with LAI Games' CEO Theo Sanders).
UFO Express, a two-player redemption game that is already testing very well in the US, is one of the first games developed with a third-party company and was generating great interest at the event.
Of its homegrown games, Piñata, a game that challenges players to break a series of piñatas on the screen by hitting a pressure pad, is “unique,” Bryant said. The game can dispense tickets and sweets and can be configured to payout one or the other, or both.
The new ColorMatch merchandiser has also been posting “incredibly good” figures while out on test and is proving to be low maintenance.
Said Bryant: “Attendance has definitely been up, there’s been a good mix of people, a very good European contingent – from markets that are quite flat at the moment, I think the overwhelming thing has been the US market – it’s definitely turned a corner.”
US buyers, he said, were out in force.
