WMS Gaming is an American slots developer that is active in both the online and land-based gambling industries, and noted for popular online slots such as Raging Rhino and Buffalo Spirit. This company’s offline operations are extensive in the United States and is responsible for several key developments in slots technology.
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The Play 4 Fun Network has managed to convince some gaming fanatics to remain loyal to their brick and mortar c asino s where they play game s that can easily get in the comfort of their homes. Wms has also touched on new social online gambling markets with the introduction of Jackpot Party. The Best WMS Slots You Must Play. There are a ton of WMS free slots online, but also those that require you to make a deposit to play for real money. Some of the most popular titles are the movie-based or cultural-based titles include Black Knight 2, Start Trek: Red Alert and many more! There are other slots that are not based on movies.
The history of WMS Gaming goes back to the 1940s through then-parent company, Williams Manufacturing Company. Early on, Williams Manufacturing was focused on amusement games and early pinball machines. They innovated several developments in the pinball industry such as the tilt mechanism and inward facing flippers that are now found at the bottom of nearly every pinball machine.
Williams Electronics, Inc. was then established in 1974 to enter the coin-operated arcade games market. During that time, they developed a number of high popular arcade game titles. Williams then took up the gambling machines market in 1991 by spinning off a new division called Williams Gaming.
Williams Gaming / WMS Gaming formally entered the modern slot machines market in 1994 and were instrumental in modernizing the slots market. At that time, slots were limited in function and stuck to the safe, classic themes featuring card suits, fruits and liberty bills. WMS Gaming introduced games with completely new themes and released the first ever multi-line video slot and released several highly popular slots in the 90s. Two notable titles developed around that time by Williams include Jackpot Party and Filthy Rich.
As the arcade and pinball industries dried up around this time, WMS Gaming began focusing exclusively on slot machines. They had great success there and began an industry trend of acquiring licensing rights from popular entertainment franchises. Some of their most popular licensed slots were themed after major brands such as Men In Black, The Wizard of Oz, Monopoly, the Lord of the Rings and more.
In 2013, Scientific Gaming (parent company of SG Interactive) took over WMS Gaming but kept the company operating under its existing brand name. WMS Gaming continues to produce slots for brick-and-mortar casinos and online casino sites alike. Some of its most popular real games today include Willy Wonka, Tropical Fish, Invaders: More Moolah, Reel riches, Mouse Trap, Austin Powers and Easy Money.
WMS Gaming Slots
With a long history in the business and a presence in highly regulated markets such as the United States, WMS Gaming is trusted and mostly liked by players. WMS Gaming slots do not have the greatest graphics and are beginning to look a bit dated by today’s standards, but the math behind the games is solid and gives players a nice balance between getting paid while still maintaining large jackpots. Their games also include a nice variety of bonus rounds to keep things fresh.
However, some WMS Gaming slots are notoriously volatile as they lean towards bigger, less frequent prizes. One of their most well-known online slots is the infamously high-variance game Raging Rhino. This game is known among players as one that can pay insanely high prizes, but is also relentlessly high-variance.
In other words, players can go long stretches without winning anything of significance before finally hitting a massive payout. The game is equal parts frustrating and rewarding. Raging Rhino even earned a spot in our top-10 list of the highest variance slots.
Other online slots produced by WMS Gaming include Super Monopoly Money, Buffalo Spirit, Double Buffalo Spirit, Bruce Lee, Amazon Queen, Super Jackpot Party, Wizard of Oz, Crystal Forest and many others.
In 2011, WMS Gaming got into running online casinos with the opening of JackpotParty.com for customers in the UK and parts of Europe. One thing they did differently than other casino sites at the time was to run a site-wide progressive jackpot that was constantly growing and could be triggered at random on any game, at any stakes at any time.
WMS Gaming sold JackpotParty.com to SkillOnNet in February of 2014 for an undisclosed amount. SkillOnNet closed the domain and moved the casino to SlotsMagic.com, but kept many WMS Gaming slots on offer in addition to expanding the game variety by bringing other software developers on-board including NextGen and Amaya.
Slots Video Previews
Below are a few video examples of WMS Gaming slots in action. This is just a small collection of the many slots that have been released by WMS Gaming over the years.
Super Monopoly Money
The Wizard of Oz: The Road to Emerald City
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
WMS Gaming is a manufacturer of slot machines, video lottery terminals and software to help casinos manage their gaming operations. It also offers online and mobile games. The company is based in Chicago, Illinois. WMS is a subsidiary of WMS Industries, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of Scientific Games Corporation in 2013.
WMS entered the reel-spinning slot machine market in 1994, and in 1996, it introduced its first hit casino slot machine, Reel 'em In, a 'multi-line, multi-coin secondary bonus' video slot machine. It followed this with a number of similar games like Jackpot Party, Boom and Filthy Rich. By 2001, it introduced its Monopoly-themed series of 'participation' slots. Since then, WMS Gaming has continued to obtain licenses to manufacture gaming machines using several additional famous brands. The company continues to sell gaming machines and to market its participation games.
History[edit]
WMS Gaming is a subsidiary of WMS Industries, whose roots date back to the 1943 founding of Williams Manufacturing Company. Over the last decades of the 20th century, Williams produced popular pinball machines and video arcade games. By 1996, WMS had transferred its video game library to its video game subsidiary, Midway Games, which it took public and finally spun off in the late 1990s.[1] With the rapid decline of the arcade industry in the 1990s, the company's pinball business became unprofitable, and WMS sold off the pinball line in 2000.[2]
Meanwhile, in 1991, WMS created a new division, Williams Gaming, to enter the gaming and state video lottery markets, developing and releasing its first video lottery terminals for the Oregon market in 1992. Williams Gaming entered the reel-spinning slot machine market in 1994, but the company's video gaming roots ultimately would prove to be its strength when, in 1996, it introduced its first hit casino slot machine, Reel 'em In, a 'multi-line, multi-coin secondary bonus' video slot machine. WMS followed this with a number of similar successful games like Jackpot Party, Boom and Filthy Rich. During the 1990s, the gaming industry grew as additional states permitted casino gambling and video lottery games, and as Native American tribes built gaming casinos. The division was incorporated as WMS Gaming in 1999 and has since focused exclusively on the manufacture, sale, leasing, licensing and management of gaming machines.[3][4]
In 2001, a glitch was uncovered in the company's software that allowed players to earn credits on some machines without paying for them.[5] The industry leader IGT also sued WMS for patent infringement related to its reel-spinning games, winning a judgment that required WMS to limit the flexibility of its line of reel-spinning games. WMS Gaming's new video operating platform, CPU-NXT, debuted in 2003. It employed a faster, more open architecture that took advantage of the economies of scale enjoyed by Intel and other PC component vendors. The slot machine platform is based on the Linux operating system, initially ran on an Intel Pentium III processor and was the first to use flash memory rather than erasable programmable read only memory.[3][6][7]
By 2001, WMS introduced its very successful Monopoly-themed series of 'participation' slots, which the company licenses or leases to casinos, instead of selling the games to the casinos. The company's subsequent participation games have included machines based on well-known entertainment-related brands as Men in Black, Hollywood Squares, The Wizard of Oz, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings and Clue. Some of these games are networked within casinos and even between multiple casinos so that players have a chance to win large jackpots based on the number of machines in the network. These branded games proved popular with players and profitable for WMS, as the net licensing revenues and lease fees generated by each game have exceeded the profit margins of its games for sale.[8][9][10] The company's revenues grew to a high of $783.3million in 2011, but they decreased to $689.7million in 2012.[11]
WMS Gaming's parent, WMS Industries, merged with Scientific Games in October 2013, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Scientific Games. Scientific Games paid $1.5 billion for WMS, and WMS shareholders received $26.00 per share. At the time of the merger, the company's stock ceased trading on the New York Stock Exchange.[11][12]
Products, technology, business[edit]
WMS Gaming's products have helped to move the industry trend away from generic mechanical slot machines and toward games that incorporate familiar intellectual properties and more creative ways to pay off. For more than a century beginning in the late 1800s, mechanical slot machine reels employed limited themes: card suits, horseshoes, bells and stars, varieties of fruit, black bars and the Liberty Bell.[6] WMS's 1996 video slot machine Reel 'em In, introduced multi-line and multi-coin secondary bonus pay-outs. Later, the company's licensed themes, beginning with Monopoly, helped to greatly expand its sales and profits.[13]
Some of WMS Gaming's product designs reflect the changing demographics of its industry. Younger players raised on video games often seek more challenging experiences, both physical and mental, than do women age 55 to 65 – the traditional audience for slot machines. Accordingly, some of the company's machines incorporate surround sound, flat-panel display screens and animated, full-color images.[14]
The company also manufactures the G+ series of video reel slots, the Community Gaming family of interconnected slots, as well as mechanical reels, poker games, and video lottery terminals.[10] WMS began to offer online gaming in 2010 to persons over 18 years old in the UK[15] and in 2011 in the US at www.jackpotparty.com.[10] In 2012, WMS partnered with Large Animal Games to incorporate several of WMS's slot machine games into a cruise ship-themed Facebook game application titled 'Lucky Cruise'. By playing games and enlisting Facebook friends' help, players can accumulate 'lucky charms' (instead of money). The game play is similar to playing a slot machine but includes a 'light strategy component'.[16][17]
In 2012, after experiencing a decline in revenues from the contracting casino market, the company introduced gaming on mobile devices and focused its efforts on expanding its online game offerings. For casinos, it introduced My Poker video poker games.[11]
WMS Gaming technologies include:
Wms Gaming Website Builder
- Transmissive Reels gaming platform, which employs video animation that is displayed around, over and seemingly interactively with mechanical reels. The technology is based on the CPU-NXT2 operating platform.[18]
- Operating platforms. CPU-NXT2 operating platform, which incorporates an Intel Pentium IV class processor, up to 2 gigabytes of random access memory, an ATI 3-D graphics chip-set, and a 40 gigabyte hard disk drive, is used in most of the games.[10] The CPU-NXT3 operating platform was introduced in 2012 for participation games and new cabinets.[11]
- Cabinets: The Bluebird2 gaming cabinet, which includes a dual 22-inch wide screen, high-definition displays, Bose speakers, and an illuminated printer and bill acceptor, was introduced in 2008.[19] The Blade and Gamefield xD cabinets were introduced in 2013.[11]
Approximately 70% of WMS's revenues are derived from U.S. customers.[9] Its corporate office and manufacturing facilities are in Las Vegas, Nevada. It has other development, sales and field services offices across the United States and international development and distribution facilities located in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, India, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain and the United Kingdom[10] and an online gaming center in Belgium.[11]
References[edit]
Wms Gaming Website App
- ^Midway Games Form S-3 filed with the SEC and dated on November 27, 2001
- ^Form 10-K Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2001, WMS Industries Inc., accessed May 9, 2012
- ^ abHughlett, Mike (November 19, 2006). 'WMS places bets on new slot technology: Server-based gaming, arcadelike machines may spur sales jackpot'. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2009-05-27.
- ^'WMS Corporate Profile'. Retrieved 2009-05-27.
- ^Yamanouchi, Kelly. 'Slot glitch offers cheater payoff', Chicago Tribune, May 1, 2001, accessed September 8, 2013
- ^ abEisenberg, Bart (January 2004). 'The New 'One-Arm Bandits' Today's slot machines are built like PCs, programmed like video games'. Software Design. Gijutsu-Hyohron Co., Ltd. Retrieved 2009-05-28.
- ^'WMS Industries Inc. 10K filing'. United States Security and Exchange Commission. September 11, 2006. Retrieved 2009-05-27.
- ^WMS Annual Report for Fiscal 2008 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 28, 2008
- ^ abWMS Annual Report for Fiscal 2010 (ending June 30, 2010) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 26, 2010
- ^ abcdeAnnual Report for Fiscal 2011, WMS Annual Reports, WMS Investor Relations pages, September 29, 2011
- ^ abcdef'WMS Annual Report for Fiscal 2013', (ending June 30, 2013) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 29, 2013
- ^'News release: Scientific Games Completes Acquisition of WMS'Archived 2014-01-17 at Archive.today, Scientific Games Corporation, October 18, 2013
- ^'WMS Reports Quarterly Record $0.41 Diluted Earnings Per Share for Fiscal 2009 Second Quarter'. Business Wire. April 21, 2009. Retrieved 2009-05-28.
- ^Rivlin, Gary (December 10, 2007). 'Slot Machines for the Young and Active'. New York Times. Retrieved 2009-05-28.
- ^WMS Quarterly Report for the period ended December 31, 2010, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 9, 2011
- ^'Lucky Cruise Launched on Facebook as First Social Game Collaboration Between Large Animal Games And WMS Gaming', WMS Gaming, Reuters, February 14, 2012
- ^Green, Marian. 'A matter of persistence…', Casino Journal.com, June 1, 2012
- ^'WMS Launches Premium, For-Sale, Multi-Game Gaming Machine on Popular Transmissive Reels Platform'. WMS press release. October 7, 2008. Retrieved 2009-05-28.
- ^'WMS Wins Four Awards for Player-Focused Products in Casino Journal's Top 20 Most Innovative Gaming Technology Products Awards for 2008'. WMS press release. April 16, 2009. Retrieved 2009-05-28.
External links[edit]