This may be the year everyone starts concentrating on what Light & Wonder is now, the content it is creating, and the performance of its games in the marketplace.

The fact is, Light & Wonder has outgrown its past incarnation. Forbes just recognized the company as the “world’s fastest-growing slot machine company.” Since its last earnings report, L&W’s earnings are up 5.1 percent, outperforming the S&P 500.

It’s been that way for a while. L&W’s shares have soared 373 percent in the last five years, and were up another 11 percent in the past month.

According to Nathan Drane, chief product officer-gaming for L&W, the overall strategy has been to reinvest in the company, and in products for all game channels, on land and online.

It starts, of course, with R&D.

“In the last few years, we’ve been reinvesting in the R&D engine,” Drane says. “And that manifests itself in a few different ways. One of them is investing in talent. So not only have we added new talent, but we’ve been bolstering our existing talent.”

That investment is matched by investment in technology. “The strategy is not just talent, but our hardware investment—our technology investment,” Drane says. “And, our content investment has started to pay dividends.”

Filling the Cabinets

L&W’s G2E display will show off a flood of content for what have been highly successful new cabinet releases the past few years.

“The last five cabinets we’ve released have gone to that coveted No. 1 spot on Eilers-Fantini (Performance Report)—from Cosmic to the Kascada dual-screen to our Landmark stepper. That enables us to reinvest. This year, we’ve released two more cabinets.

“With the Horizon, we got back into the jumbo category. We also leveraged the Landmark stepper and went into the transparent stepper for-sale category. I’m excited because we’re going to debut two more hardware variants at G2E.”

The effort is making that R&D investment pay off. “The teams are busy, right?” says Drane. “We’ve grown the teams, we’re making sure we’re supporting the existing products and then we’re growing on top of that.”

One more cabinet reveal will come at G2E. “We’re going to come out with a new Cosmic Upright,” he says. “We haven’t debuted that yet to any customers or the market.”

The original Cosmic cabinet, introduced early last year, is a slant-top, with a 49-inch curved portrait monitor and sleek contours. “It’s been the No. 1 slant portrait cabinet, with over a dozen games over one and a half times house average,” Drane says.

“We want to double down on that. We’re going to bring it out as an upright. It’s going to have that beautiful Cosmic edge lighting, the 49-inch screen, that topper that’s so close to the main screen, making it feel like one contiguous experience… but it’s going to be on an upright base.

“We think that’s important. We think that’s what the market is looking for. So, we’ll be able to bring some of those great Cosmic titles to Cosmic Upright, but we’ll also be able to bring some of our latest content to that cabinet. We’re not only investing in hardware, we’re investing in studios and franchises.”