Brian Upton on the three exciting new brands coming from NetEnt

At this year’s ICE London, NetEnt made quite a splash by showing up with several new brands in their portfolio of games. Appealing to the casual TV viewer and the old school gamer alike, they had a little bit of everything, and our Becky Liggero Fontana caught up with Director of Games, Brian Upton, to talk about what these new games will bring to the public.

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The first new brand they spoke about is a classic of the industry that NetEnt is bringing modern features to: Starburst. “Okay, so we know that jackpots are kind of driving a lot of player engagement, so its happening and we’ve been working long and hard on something that’s like the next, next level,” Upton said. “So we have community element, we have a kind of collection element, we have kind of an offline payment part of it, we has everything. So it’s like, totally configurable, customizable, we’ve just gone to town, and then we put the Starburst brand, which is like the biggest one.”

But bringing in new brands is often about bringing in a recognizable, mainstream brand to get new players hooked. For that, NetEnt was proud to show off their deal for the Hell’s Kitchen brand. “So I think, like, I’m a big believer in just diversity,” he said. “”So just trying to do different things all the time, right? Then the industry moves so fast, and we’ve never tackled this kind of subject matter I guess. And when we were talking about the brands, you know when something’s good because your creative team light up, and they had so many ideas about how to tackle this brand in so many ways. I mean it was hard choice, we had so many concepts to pick from, but just having the red and blue kitchen against each other and how do we make that work and it’s, Gordon just coming in and screwing things up or just, you know, adding some extra spice to it. So it’s a huge brand, or he’s a huge brand, Hell’s Kitchen is a huge brand. Its global, its lifestyle, lots of people know it, it’s perfect. So I think it’s going to be a big one.”