31 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2024 scenes with what’s going on around them. Only the NextGen database could have accomplished this and produced these graphics. Ghostbusters with Infinity was the highestperforming licensed property in the Michigan Lottery’s focus-group testing, and after three weeks in market was the Lottery’s sixth best $5 game ever, excluding holiday games. At nine weeks, it has an index of 116. There are video clips on YouTube of players scratching the tickets to reveal what’s beneath the coating, with viewers adding comments like “cool,” “fun tickets,” and “these cards look ace.” With the combination of NextGen and Infinity, a lottery gets the benefit of the new programming with new games that not only look better, play better, and offer more play options, but are also more secure. IGT has been nimble enough to leapfrog over what has come before to add value for lottery customers and players. Has IGT implemented any other new security technologies? Keith Cash: IGT has been working on implementing security as a process tightly integrated into instant ticket production for some time, though it may not have been known in the industry (see sidebar). IGT implemented end-to-end, hardware- encrypted hard drives in 2018, for example. This innovation ensured that live game data was never stored unencrypted “at rest,” and it was operational and in the market years before other technology suppliers. We prefer an incremental “build a little, test a little” approach, especially with something as complex as instant ticket production. We conduct an internal audit whenever we integrate a new security feature into our production process. Of course, whenever we integrate new technology into our production security process, we ensure that our internal auditors review the new technology and the overall security process. Thus, passing external audits is essentially a fait accompli thanks to the intense effort and testing that has come before. All instant ticket manufacturers agree that we must provide security and that game programming is critical. IGT simply thinks we should provide that security using modern technology to deliver unparalleled transparency and accountability. Or, to put it another way, IGT employs NextGen's patented technology daily to monitor the instant game programming process for every game we produce, automatically generating unalterable blockchain-protected forensic files in a manner not done with legacy one-dimensional game generation systems. This automated, forensic documentation of each step of the process for each game generated is available to our lottery customers, providing unprecedented transparency at any time in addition to any occasional assessments performed by outside auditors that are routine in our industry. I’ve said before that we’re driven to innovate because we’re not vested in the status quo but in how groundbreaking technologies can bring further innovation to the instant ticket business. Ghostbusters™ & © 2024 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Michigan launched a 12-scene Ghostbusters™ game in September 2023 (one scene pictured, uncovered), a highperformer that benefits from the power of both NextGen and Infinity Instants technologies.
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