Jeeps asked (paraphrasing a long post) whether I believed Guaranteed Play cost bunches to produce and can the little guy break into the slot-machine-or-video-poker-machine creation business.
Yes I believe GP cost that much. Jay Walker is a VERY impressive guy. He invented Priceline.com, among other ventures, and has hundreds or perhaps thousands of patents. At the last gaming show, there were perhaps a dozen reps wearing Walker Digital Gaming shirts talking about GP --- I don't know how many math and computer nerds stayed home. GP is an especially big investment by WDG and IGT. The first news out of Station seems to be that they made a terrible miscalculation, but we'll see. There are a number of ways they can induce people to play that they haven't explored yet.
To show a game to IGT you need a patent before they'll even talk to you. IGT does release a few games a year from outside inventors. One relatively low cost way to go about it is to approach one of the game creation companies IGT uses --- Action Gaming (Ernie Moody) and Leading Edge Design (Larry DeMar) are the biggest --- and see if they will represent you. They are always looking for good ideas. If they like your idea it has a better chance of actually getting into the IGT stable. The game designers will take a piece of the action, to be sure, but you have a lot better chance of success if one of these companies are behind you. If Action and LED don't like your idea, you're free to approach IGT directly of course, but most people don't succeed that route.
There are other manufacturers than IGT, of course. You can approach Bally Gaming or WMS or Konami or whomever. But IGT has 80%+ of the video poker machines in casinos so your chances of having it get to the floor are better with IGT than the others.
Bob Dancer
For a 3-day free trial of Video Poker for Winners, the best video poker computer trainer ever invented, go to //www.videopokerforwinners.com