Slot gaming companies use every design feature under the sun to try to stand out. In a market where there are thousands of worthy competitors, and with hundreds of new games being added onto the pile every year, it can be the smallest elements of a game that can help a fresh slot title stick its head above the parapet. Ultimately, it can come in many forms; it is not an exact science.
Some slot gamers will seek out titles that have a strong audiovisual element, ones that catch their eyes. For others, the most interesting slots are the ones with unique niche themes.
While the sheer volume of online slot games has made the industry ultra-competitive and brought in some of the best game designers in the world, today, we are focusing on how font usage is an integral part of game design and can subconsciously pique interest and bring people on board.
Sticking To The Theme
Casino companies use a range of strategies to deliver games that can tap into the vast digital market. From a promotional perspective, slot games make up an integral part. However, over the last few years, particularly on social media, we have seen many of these promotional ideas shift toward broader, more generic themes such as giveaways and memes, with the aim of generating as much engagement as possible, as you can see in the link below.
Think about it. If you play a candy-themed slot game, you come across a generic font. It doesn’t drive home the theme. Candy-themed games are known for their color and vibrancy; they often feature a dreamy, light soundtrack. By contrast, TV-themed games, especially licensed ones, will have font, music, and designs that all speak to the show in question.
Font plays a huge role in this. It’s often the first thing people see when they are browsing slot games, and if a website has a tiled or list design, you can browse through a few dozen games in the space of 30 seconds – and if the font catches the eye, then this can help a title stand out in an ocean of competition. It can be the fine line that turns a title into a global success or sends it to the heap with hundreds of other well-designed, but generic designs.
The Cherry On The Cake
A lot of the talk in the game design market is that innovation will come from emerging industries, such as AI. When a gaming sector finds global success, it often follows a similar pattern. There are those games that emerged in the earliest years, and they yield great success for the top companies in the space. Crystallizing at the top of the market as a surge of new customers enters the slot gaming market.
Once this has happened, a second wave of designers and platforms looks to strike while the iron is hot. Some of these companies find success, but as they are joining the party slightly later and the market has become more saturated, it can be more difficult. Once a market reaches this point, design quality becomes crucial. This is where smaller elements, or what can be perceived as smaller elements, start to become defining features.
Think of Egyptian mythology, Norse mythology, oriental themes, and Irish mythology: all of these games have a font that your mind immediately jumps to. You may not know what it is called, but you often know the type of game it is, often by the font design. The game itself needs to have a strong design, too, of course, but those games that use a generic font, or one that doesn’t immediately stand out, are already creating an uphill battle for themselves.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to promoting and marketing, game design companies need to use everything they have at their disposal. Although the type of font they use might not be the first thing that springs to mind, individual fonts are synonymous with all types of games, not just in slot gaming.
Think of Grand Theft Auto – one of the most recognizable video console games ever made. The font is immediately recognizable. The release of the game later this year, after numerous pushbacks, has been pre-empted by one of the biggest trailer releases of all time at the back end of 2023. Within a few seconds of that trailer, the iconic font appears on the screen, and this is just one of countless examples of how important font is when it comes to game design.
As slot gaming continues to move into exciting and innovative areas such as VR, it’s the integral features that can still yield the greatest returns when properly integrated. As long as slot companies remain aware of this, then slots will remain an enormous part of the audiovisual appeal for many years to come.