Welcome to the top of the tree. SG is a gigantic international corporation with a number of different divisions.
We’ll get to the list of casino games, but we will have to cover something of the company’s corporate structure along the way. We think it’s always valuable to understand a little about how the games you love are delivered to you – knowledge is power, my friends!
We’ll mostly concentrate on:
- SG, which is how Scientific Games is known, and,
- SG Digital, a gaming subsidiary of SG, which is itself a conglomerate of a number of companies.
Best SG Casinos to Play SG Slots
Scientific Games – SG
Scientific Games is one of the oldest companies in gambling. Its roots go back to horseracing at the time of the First World War, though it is now best known for its lottery and online gambling products and sold off its track betting company a while ago.
The company is massive by gambling company standards, employing nearly 10,000 people in six continents. Its HQ is in Las Vegas.
Under the SG banner come some companies that are still operating as independent game producers, and who we consider in that way. For example, we recently covered Barcrest games, and that company is now under the SG umbrella. Bally too are an SG company.
SG are everywhere: they own numerous game producers, as well as websites, technical companies and have stakes in a load of lotteries.
Among their most notable online video slots buys are: Barcrest, Bally, WMS, NextGen, and NYX.
NYX was bought in 2017.
This helped to create:
SG Digital
Which is the company under which most SG’s games are released. The company is a collection of nine game-development companies that produce games under their own labels, in most cases.
The company has nearly 2,000 employees, and you’ll find their products everywhere.
In general, we have stuck to the games that the company – or industry sites we trust – chooses to brand as its own.
Let’s have a look at the games, which we’ll cover by brand.
SG Slots
SG’s own brand is credited with 47 slots in the UK online casino scene on the industry audit site we use.
Their currently most popular SG slots titles are:
88 Fortune: A Chinese-themed cute animated game with a 250,000 coin top prize (paid for with high volatility, but balanced with generous 96% RTP), this game had been on the market since 2016, and is still hitting big with players.
Football Hero: A 95% RTP and another 250,000 top prize is the headline news in this 2018 release that’s got a really good sporting element to it that actually does deliver something like the thrills of an arcade version of football. It’s in the UK top 400 and is one of the best sports games out there.
Jin Ji Bao Xi: Endless Treasure: Another Chinese themed game from 2019 even includes a lucky 88 as the minimum bet amount. You can win 2,840-times your bet on a 95.32% theoretical return to the player game that looks and plays beautifully.
Kronos Unleashed: Ancient Greece and its gods provide the backdrop for this time-themed game, with similar stats – 95.86% RTP with a 250,000 top prize with betting from 0.2 and 100 pay lines. The game was released in 2018.
Monopoly Mega Movers: Just 30 pay-lines on this game tied into the massive board-game hit with that massive 250,000-coins top prize in place.
Mighty Black Knight: A cartoon take on medieval action and adventure.
Lock It Link It Night Life: A conversion from cabinet games, this title is part of a series of games themed on luxury living and lifestyles of the rich and famous. Which could be you if you hit the top prize.
Monopoly 250K: Themed around the big-money game, and the big-money prize you could win in this five-by-five video slot with a jackpot potential.
Quick Hit Super Wheel: a 2018 release on a five-by-three grid goes retro to give players a 30 pay-line game that’s packed with bonuses on the Super Wheel round, and pays out big on a quick hit jackpot from the main game.
Gems Gems Gems: As the name implies, this is a very classic slot with multiple supplementary reels to add some spice to the gameplay. You can spin big on this one, with £80 the top end of the betting scale.
Scientific Games Table Games
SG also make casino games
Their top games in the UK currently are:
Fortune Pai Gow Poker: A 97.47% RTP game with 8,000-times bet as the top prize, this is a 2019 take on the ultra-popular poker variant.
Original Roulette: A standard roulette game from 2019 with bright colour cartoon looks.
Three Card Poker: Three ways to play and four ways to win in this classic POV game.
Key Bet Roulette: This is one of the top titles around the casino sites. It was released in 2015 and has getting on for 95% RTP, with a top payout of 36 times your bet, as you’d expect from a standard roulette game.
Ultimate Texas Hold’Em: Another popular title from SG that you’ll see in the casino rooms of many a great online casino.
DJ Wild Stud Poker: Side bets and a very good RTP are a great reason to play this hit game released in 2018 and with a 2,000-times bet top prize.
Let It Ride: A 2014 game that is based on five-card stud poker, with betting from 1 to 75 coins.
It’s hard to say that SG has a particular style to its games, though there are some features that we’ve seen running across a number of titles. It’s notable that SG releases a lot of Chinese and Chinese culture-themed games. The table games tend to be quite straight forward without too many visual gimmicks.
SG Future Releases
As we write, SG has four games in the pipeline.
They are: Jackpot Wars, due in April 2020.
Battleship Missile Strike, due the same month.
Golden Asia is also due out in 2020 and is another 5 by 3 reel video slot.
SG Digital
As we’ve seen SG Digital is a collection of brands, including some that are big stand-alone names in their own right.
What we’ll do here is take a look at the releases that SG Digital has chosen to put the spotlight on, and then take a look at the performance of their gaming brands.
The currently featured titles at SG Digital are:
Raging Rhinos Megaways
This game was released in June 2017 on the Red7 label, though it seems to be an update on a WMS title that is also a land-based slot. The game has a 96%+ theoretical return to player, and high variance promises bigger prizes (but paid out less often). You can stake from 20p to £20 on this 6 reel game. The Megaways engine gives you more than 100,000 potential winning combinations.
Merlin’s Money Burst
This game is released under the NextGen marque. It is extraordinary. The reel set up is out of this world with six reels, three of them with three rows and two with two. The cartoon graphics, atmosphere, ambience and style are really excellent. There’s nothing surreal about the really high RTPs and a 200-times stake top prize.
Foxin Twins
This is also from NextGen and is a member of a massive family of games that have been a particular hit with bingo players. This version, which introduces a sleek female fox to the cartoon family, has a-typical reel sets, a great RTP and 500-times stake top prizes. A worthy addition to the fox family and one that is likely to prove popular with chat room players at the bingo sites.
Medusa Megaways
Another NextGen release, this one from 2018, this is a Megaways update of the popular game based on one of the most famous Greek legends. The big news here is a massive top prize, and of course Megaways – and a big reel set – deliver a huge number of potential wins. Lots of bonuses culminate in a great free spins game.
Lucky Lanes
Another Red7 title from 2019, and bizarrely based on traffic! Fair enough! It’s more fun than that sounds, and the reels are replaced by lanes to deliver the symbols which gives this 3 by 3 game a real originality and makes it work particularly well on mobile screens.
Prism Blast
This game from 2019 and released under the Red7 label, this game is a futuristic sci-fi game not dissimilar to Starburst in look and feel – fruits in space. It looks fantastic and has a great 97% rtp with a top prize of 15,000-times stake. A really eye-catching title.
SG Digital Brands
Let’s have a closer look at some of the SG Digital Brands and see how they perform.
1 – NextGen
NextGen slots are legendary in their own right. Founded in 1999, NextGen was first taken over by NYX Gaming, and NYX joined SG to help form SG Digital in 2017.
The brand is rated as the 18th most popular in UK casino sites at the moment.
Its biggest titles at the moment are:
Irish Eyes, Foxin’ Wins, Pillars of Asgard, Rise of the Mountain King, and Cash Stampede.
Most recently, Rise of the Mountain King, Golden Nugget Video Slot, Pillars of Asgard, Merlin’s Money Burst, Foxin’ Twins, and 300 Shields Extreme have joined the NextGen family.
Their games can be found everywhere you find slots, but the Foxin’ family have established the company as favourites in the bingo world.
In total, there are 241 NextGen slot titles, including 24 scratch card games, and five-card games, and four roulette titles. The casinos which give their games the most prominence are: Wicked jackpots, Slotjar, Luna Casino, Vegas Winner, and Strictly Cash.
2 – Red7
There are just 30 slots (well, 29 slots and a card game) credited to Red7, a company founded in Bristol in 2011 and boasting a wonderful rating as the 25th most popular UK online slots provider.
The casinos who like Red7 games the most are: Rizk, Dunder, Wild Slots, Play OJO.
The company’s current top titles are:
Gremlins, Action Bank Plus, 777 Burn ‘Em Up, Raging Rhino Megaways, and Spartacus Legendary Warrior.
Gremlins is a recent release and it joins recent and planned games like Reactive Mega Shop, Tetris Extreme, Action Bank Plus, Nessie’s Treasure Megadrop Quest, and G.R.O.W.
3 – WMS
WMS are American and you’ll notice the change in style when you see their games.
They have a roster of 139 slots available to UK players, and their games can be found at 630 casinos.
The figures we use, make these the casinos at which you’re most likely to see WMS games: Mr Play, William Hill, bCasino.
The company is a quite old school, with a 1974 foundation date, and a number of their hits are cross-overs from the world of real-world games.
History aside, their current hits are:
Spartacus Gladiator of Rome, Frozen Inferno, Raging Rhino (the sequel is handled by Red7 for some reason), The Wizard of Oz Ruby Slippers, Elvis the King Lives.
Their most recent releases are: Montezuma Megaways, Heidi and Hannah’s Bier Haus, Enchanted Kingdom, Elvis Lives, Monopoly Grand Hotel, and Zeus II.
4 – NYX Gaming Group
NYX also still exists and has a small number of games branded in its own name.
The currently most popular of these titles – actually, there are only five, so this is all of them in order:
Jukepot, Cubis, King Kong: Island of Skull Mountain, Gulliver’s Travels, Queen of Nile II.
You will find these games at UK casinos, but they are not very high profile. The top casino for NYX Gaming Group games is Spinstation.
The Future of SG Digital
SG Digital makes games, but its customers are casino sites, not the customers of casino sites who end up playing the game.
So, you need to remember that these games are being sold to casino sites as a good way to get you to spend as much time as possible at their site. And the reason they want you to spend all that time at their sites is that you will probably – but not definitely, always remember that – lose money over time.
The latest marketing set-up from SG Digital brings together all the company’s brands and sells them to casino companies.
This is called OpenGaming:
It promises to bring together all the SG Digital brands:
WMS, Shuffle Master, NextGen, Bally, Barcrest, and Red 7, along with partner studios: BTG, ELK Studios, Evolution Gaming, 4 The Player, Instant Win Gaming, and Lightning Box and more to provide a huge selection of games.
This is the operating system for SG Digital.
It features games which are grouped by type and by feature, and it offers some exclusive features to players, via casino sites.
Things like Free Rounds 2.0, and Missions, which are engagement tools designed to keep you playing (this isn’t critical, players will play good games that entertain them, and that’s what game designers aim to do).
The big features on offer from SG Digital are:
Megadrop Jackpots
This is a branded style of a progressive jackpot, and currently, there are only eight titles in the range, including Dr Reactive, Tetris Extreme, Prism Blast, and Enchanted Kingdom.
Expect to see more.
Megaways Slots
This ways-to-win engine is a much more familiar style of branded feature, offering many more potential winning combinations than the traditional set of pay lines found on online video slots can.
There are currently 10 Megaways titles:
Montezuma Megaways, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Megaways, Raging Rhino Megaways, Extra Chilli Megaways, Rainbow Riches Megaways, White Rabbit Megaways, Battleship Direct Hit Megaways, Monopoly Megaways, Medusa Megaways, and 88 Fortune Megaways.
Branded Slot Hits
SG Digital also does a lot of tie-in titles. This is a sign of a company that has a lot of power in the market because big name brands don’t want to sign up with just anyone, they can pick and choose. We’ve seen a few already, like Monopoly and Tetris, but you’ll also find films like Anchorman and Gremlins, plus entertainers like Elvis, and the German Band Electric 6 behind the unlikely tie-in, Danger Danger High Voltage.
SG Casino Software Summing Up
There’s so much to cover with SG casino software that it’s hard to know where to start. This company is massive, delivering hundreds of slot titles via its gaming division, SG Digital. It’s also massively powerful and popular across the wider gambling industry, including the lottery and sports betting world.
SG Digital is the main company as far as slots players are concerned. But they are rarely likely to know that they are interacting with that company at all, knowing their favourite games instead by the studios that design them, the likes of NextGen, Red7, Barcrest and Bally. And now SG Digital has even more reached through its operating systems, which carry titles by almost every casino games designer under the sun.
You can play all of these games expecting a good-quality, safe and legal experience, and it’s likely you’ll see more of them in future, although you may not even know it!