Who are NYX Gaming?
Within the worldwide online casino industry, NYX Gaming truly are a big cheese. Casino players may well be familiar with the name via their excellent slot designs. Many games are released under their own branding, but in reality NYX Gaming is part of a vast international conglomerate, responsible for several big name brands.
The history of NYX Gaming is a difficult one to follow. It is one of many companies in the online gaming sector whose story is one of continual corporate take overs, buy outs and mergers. Unfortunately I do not have the skills of a forensic accountant, nor the funds to hire the services of a corporate consultant. Nevertheless, let’s give it a go…
The original company was founded in Sweden in 2009 as NYX Interactive, and was headquartered in the capital city, Stockholm. The company soon developed a good reputation for well designed, popular games.
The corporate shenanigans began soon enough though. In 2011, the company acquired rival big name gaming software company NextGen Gaming, with the company name becoming merged too, operating under the new brand NYX Gaming.
Subsequent years saw consistent and rapid growth, with a portfolio of in excess of a hundred entertaining slots soon built up. But make too much progress too fast in this game, and you can attract some unwanted attention. Sure enough, 2017 saw a takeover bid from rival gaming operation Scientific Games. The move was a bold one, not immediately popular with its influential institutional shareholders. But by the end of the year, the company had secured the support of the overwhelming majority of shareholders, including Sky Bet and William Hill.
The takeover was therefore formally completed early in January 2018. This time, the NYX name disappeared from the name of the new holding company, which remains Scientific Games, or SG Digital. The NYX Gaming brand remains, but is wholly owned by the new umbrella company.
The original Scientific Games parent company was founded in 1973, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The current CEO of SG Digital is Matt Davey, who was an original founder of NextGen Gaming, and had led NYX Gaming since his own company had been acquired in 2011.
The company is now quite a major international conglomerate, owning many of the most recognisable brands in the online gaming industry. These include familiar names like Bally Technologies, Barcrest, Bet Digital, NextGen Gaming, NYX Interactive, Scientific Games, Side City Studios and WMS Industries.
SG Digital operates offices based on four continents across the world. It has around a dozen offices situated in major cities throughout Europe. These include Athens, London, Rome and Stockholm. It also has eight outposts in North America, such as Chicago and New Jersey in the United States, and Calgary, Montreal and Vancouver in Canada, plus a pair of offices in Australia and finally, Singapore in South East Asia. The group’s worldwide headquarters remains in Las Vegas in the US.
Popular games in the NYX / NextGen and now SG Digital stable include big name slot titles like 1 Can 2 Can, Double Play Super Bet, Foxin’ Wins and Merlin’s Millions. There are well over a hundred NYX / NextGen titles in total, and the majority of today’s top casinos include these games among their repertoire.
NYX was responsible for more than just creating superb slots though. It is also responsible for a good range of traditional casino games, with most table game formats fully covered.
The year 2012 saw the launch of its new gaming platform NYX Open Gaming System. This was an effective white label operation, enabling independent casino operators to launch their own casinos quickly and simply. The platform could not only run NYX’s range of around a hundred titles, but also seamlessly integrate games from other providers too. SG Digital continues to run this operation as a discrete brand.
The total number of games under the SG Digital umbrella now numbers well over two thousand, when its licenced partners’ games are included. This means that casino operators licencing the group’s Open Gaming platform really do have an exceptional range of games to select from.
The platform is very popular with both independent casino operators and other bigger names in the business too, along with the sports betting software package OpenBet. These include top sports betting and casino portals such as Bet365, Betsson, Coral and Mr Green.
Through its many incarnations and name changes, the quality of NYX Interactive / gaming / SG Digital games has remained high. There is no reason to believe this will change under the responsible stewardship of its new owners. Indeed, with the extra investment and funding its new owners will bring, we can be sure the NYX brand will live on and prosper.