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Notes -
Friend of mine works in Slot Machine Software Development which is essentially the most pared back coalface version of Video Game Development, and it's already absolutely ripped through the industry.
A typical small-medium slot 5 years ago would be 2 or 3 ideas guys/product managers/game mathematicians in the West, a bunch of artists in Eastern Europe and a bunch of cheap coding resources and aim to get a slot out every couple months since it's prettymuch a crapshoot which games will manage to surface through the literal 1000s of new releases each year and the publishers/distributors will usually only give a first-month bump to new titles visibility.
Now a lot of the small-mid studios have collapsed and there's a ton of one or two-man bands just yeeting stuff into the void.
As in literal slot machines? I'd always heard that the Vegas gaming authorities made that a surprisingly-regulated software industry, up there with aerospace or automotive. Not that those are perfect, but they at least have standards for their code to adhere to.
But maybe "write this in MISRA C" (automotive) isn't as much of a moat as it sounded, now that I think about it.
Honestly Vegas is pretty outgunned for slot development these days. Australia's generally the frontier for land-based physical slots since they're available in various auspices throughout most of the country, and online is dominated by brands targeting the Crypto space since there's way less regulations.
A lot of the issue with targeting 'white'/fully-legal areas is that the tax regimes tend to be nuts, the demographic trends elderly and women in a lot of cases who aren't particularly down with innovation and there's a ton more jostling when it comes to placing physical cabinets in limited floorspace. Also every single white region will have their own arbitrary ideas about harm reduction and responsible gambling, a lot of which are headaches to program since there'll be stuff like 'you can't show more than X 'near-misses' per 100 plays' with fairly arbitrary definitions since it's some random 80 year old on the approvals board.
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