4ThePlayer Review

1. Who is 4ThePlayer according to you?

We are a boutique games provider - a small startup team with a big personality and a global player base. We see ourselves as a challenger brand - a disruptor if you will - as we do things differently to a lot of the stock market-listed ‘powerhouse’ game providers.

2. What are your goals?

‍For players to have fun! We are all about entertainment, bringing those magical moments, the edge-of-seat excitement, and those big wins that you tell your friends and family about. Of course, we want our games to be commercially successful, but we believe this can be done in combination with player-centric values. We believe a lot of game providers have lost focus on the player. We put the player at the centre of what we do - it’s even in our name! We are all players too, which we think is super important and, again, sadly not that common. We spend a few hours every Friday playing the new releases of the week, and we’re super immersed in the space.
Our goal is to stand out, but for all the right reasons: hopefully, one day we’ll get to a point where when we release a game, it will be instantly recognised as one of ours due to the innovation, entertainment, and production values.

3. Can you tell us about your journey and what motivated you to start developing slots? How have you developed since then? What is special about your games?

The founding team of 4ThePlayer has a combined industry experience of over 50 years! We all met while working at Ash Gaming, a startup by Chris Ash, who is now one of our founders! Weird fact, but the AboutSlots domain name was first registered by me at Ash Gaming, and run as an affiliate site 17 years ago, so it’s funny to now be interviewed by you on AboutSlots! Ash Gaming made a big impact and was acquired by Playtech. Fast forward a few years and Andrew, our CEO, decided to create a startup with a twist and 4ThePlayer was born! They asked me to join them and the band was back together, doing what we love with a clear focus and
unique direction. All our games have a player-centric innovation, something fun and different – often to fix a player's common frustration or complaint. Internally, we have an innovation metre and we try to maintain a balance of really ‘out there’ innovations and some less exotic concepts. Two good examples are 10x Rewind and 3 Secret Cities. With 10x Rewind, we invented the first slot that actually spins backwards and allows you to win your wins again - that one is way up there on the innovation metre! Meanwhile, 3 Secret Cities introduced BONUS UP - this innovation improves your bonus potential the longer you wait to get it. This is totally separate from your stake, so you have the freedom to bet more or less at any point without being penalised and losing your progress.

Our latest game, 4 Deals with the Devil, has a great twist: for the first time, players can choose a bonus that matches their appetite - either Cool, Medium, Hot or Xtra Hot, each with a matching feature frequency and potential. Do you want a bonus more often but with lower potential or are happy to wait for the epic potential? The choice is yours!

4. What’s your best game?

Our most popular game is 4 Fantastic Fish, which I think is a fin-tastic game! It evolves the concept of a normal fishing game and removes a lot of the usual player frustrations. For example, the cash symbols actually pay out in the base game if they land as a winning way, and the Giant Squid can shuffle your wins to improve or create a win from a near miss. Our next most popular is 90k Yeti Gigablox, which is our take on a Gigablox game - again, we looked at what had been done with the mechanic and found a way to improve it. As I am sure you can imagine, Gigablox are very powerful, expensive symbols to have on the reel bands when balancing a slot. We created Snow Blox, which allow Gigablox to feature on the reels a lot more than in other games, and opened up the Gigablox formula as a proper Ways game.
Meanwhile, the mighty Yeti can smash the Snow Blox and create some epic wins! 90k Yeti has an awesome derivative coming soon called 7 Gold Gigablox, where we took all the learning and player feedback from 90k Yeti, added a popular scatter prize feature, and made something pretty special! Also, watch this space for a follow-up to 4 Fantastic Fish: there could be a new contender for the best fishing game in the tuna-verse!

‍5. What are your future plans?

Our plan is to stay boutique, so that we can really focus on each game rather than just becoming a slot factory or conveyor belt with multiple releases every week. We plan on allowing more players to enjoy our games with further regulated market expansion: we have just gone live in New Jersey USA under a transactional waiver, with our own full licence on its way. We are also underway in Michigan and Pennsylvania and hope to launch games in those states in the not-so-distant future. When any newly regulated market opens, we look at it in detail and, if it makes sense to do so, we will try to offer our games there.

6. What would you like to tell our viewers/fans/players?

‍Firstly, we’d like to say thank you for playing our games and we hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoy making them. We love player feedback, good and bad, and spend a lot of time replying and interacting with you all, so please do keep it coming!