How EQL Games Became An iLottery Disruptor And What Comes Next

A certain lottery content studio has enjoyed a few strong months.

In March, it announced the start of a series of “many game launches” with the Michigan Lottery’s online platform that bolstered its presence in the United States market. 

Then last week, it unveiled a multi-year partnership with the new UAE Lottery, delivering products from its own portfolio of games but also helping the lottery operators with their product selection.

That content studio?

Not IGT. Or NeoPollard. Or Scientific Games. Or Allwyn.

It’s EQL Games.

Based in Louisville, Kentucky, EQL Games has quietly emerged as a dark horse and a disruptor in an iLottery space that’s been mostly dominated by the same handful of names for years.

“I’m sure there are different ways to describe our journey, but ‘underdog’ certainly makes sense,” EQL Games Founder and CEO Brad Cummings said in an interview with Lottery Geeks. “It’s an industry where there have not been many new companies that have actually taken a good foothold in the industry, especially in the U.S.

“I want to be the leading independent lottery content studio in the world.”

Applying lessons from iGaming to iLottery

EQL Games debuted in the market in 2014 as EquiLottery Games, a live sports lottery games company. In 2020, it launched the industry’s first live sports lottery game — Win Place Show — with the Kentucky Lottery. It racked up partnerships with major sports such as the NBA, MLB, and NASCAR during those early years.

In 2021, it rebranded to EQL Games and began a multi-pronged lottery content studio approach. Today, the company consists of four main branches:

• Aggregation: iLottery Marketplace — “sort of content meets platform,” Cummings said — consists of more than 300 games from 20 developers, including Fennica Gaming, Greentube, ReelPlay, Random State, and EvoPlay.
• Game development: EQL Labs creates its own games. Titles include Grand Slam, Honey Money, and Endzone Rush.
• Licensing: The company has deals with U.S. Soccer, the Harlem Globetrotters, and Team USA/LA 2028 Summer Olympics.
• Technology: It boasts that its tech stack can support 1.6 million requests per minute and more than 8,000 connections.

EQL Games works with online lotteries in Michigan, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Cummings indicated the company will announce partnerships with four of five more state lotteries in the next 12-18 months.

Cummings noted that the current U.S. lottery partnerships are able to touch all four branches of the EQL Games business, which makes it distinct from similar companies in the industry.

“We’re not going to just offer exactly what everyone else is offering,” Cummings said. “We looked at the iGaming marketplace. We looked at iLottery studios that are in Europe that were doing a very different style of iLottery gaming and thought we could be a bridge to those other visions for game development. … [We’re] trying to push the category forward, not make the market the same product over and over again.

“We’ve come in with a fresh perspective, and that’s starting to pay dividends.”

Brewing an ‘on-demand’ type of draw game

Some near-future next steps for EQL Games to keep pushing that fresh perspective, Cummings said, include developing “different types of draw games that take advantage of the immediacy of online.”

“Imagine an on-demand product versus something that draws once a day or once every couple of days or even three times a day,” he said. “I mean, it’s the lottery online, so I should be able to interact with that product like I interact with the instant product. And so you’ll see draw game products from us as well that are along those lines as we grow.”

The company also plans to return to live sports lottery games development next year, Cummings said, now that it has a larger distribution model to work with.

Advantages of being a small company

Cummings credits a lot of his company’s success to its ability to be nimble and bring new ideas and perspectives to lotteries and vendors it wants to associate with.

As noted in his quote near the top of this article, he foresees EQL Games becoming the leading independent lottery studio in the world.

“When you work with a large corporation, and not saying anything against it, but it’s just a different style,” Cummings said. “When you’ve got a large corporation, there are some things that they do really well, but when it gets down to the really nitty gritty sort of specifics and the care of every piece of product that goes out the door and all that, I think a smaller company like ours has benefits from the CEO being right there.

“We’re a team of just over 20 people. So everybody has a relationship with me. It keeps a very specific vision for the company and for the way we want to treat our clients and for the way that we look at product. Everybody is pretty close to the sun, so to speak. It just gives it a different feel.”

As he acknowledged, larger companies “do things we can’t do, right? But we’re able to put a little extra care into the smaller things, which matter a lot to lotteries as well.”