Beyond Sound: How iGaming Audio Is Shaping the Future of Game Audio

🎙️ What inspired the creation of iGaming Audio, and what gap did the studio want to fill?

iGaming Audio started about 11 years ago, when the slot audio landscape looked completely different. Developers hadn't yet realized how much good sound was doing for their games, and I made it my mission to change that, game by game, studio by studio.

The purpose was simple: provide genuinely high-quality audio packages for slot games at a time when most composers and sound designers looked down on slots as something inferior to other forms of entertainment. That was the gap. So the studio became one of the first to focus solely on slots and other iGaming content like crash games.

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🎙️ Could you take us inside the studio and explain how a project moves from the first brief to final delivery?

The process is fairly standard by now, whether I'm the one creating the audio for a game or providing the Audio Direction and acting as a liaison between the client and the composer or sound designer working on it.

The first step is always discovery. The client sends a brief, and my job is to decode that brief into musical terms, ask the right questions, clear up the vague bits, and push hard for references. References matter more than people expect. Music and sound are deeply subjective: what sounds happy and cheerful to me might sound bland, or even melancholic, to someone else. We need a shared vocabulary before anyone writes a note.

Once we have that common ground, we move to ideation. Either I or someone from the team puts together a few ideas and we share them with the client to make sure we're heading in the right direction. Once that's confirmed, we build the full-length background music tracks, because those shape the entire sonic palette of the game.

With the music done, we move on to the sounds that don't need to be tightly tied to animations. That gives animators and developers time to implement the final versions while we keep working.

Last come the sounds that have to sit perfectly in sync with animation. When time is tight we'll start from animation previews, but the final timing is always judged once everything is implemented in the game.

Then comes iteration. We test the game rigorously, triggering as many scenarios as we can to hear how everything works together, and we check it across devices: phone speakers, earbuds, headphones, laptop speakers. A mix that sings on studio monitors and falls apart on a phone hasn't done its job.

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🎙️ How much can sound influence the way players perceive a game's mechanics and features?

Much more than most of us imagine. It's telling that the UK's technical standards (UKGC's RTS) go as far as specifying that a win below the stake shouldn't sound celebratory. You don't write rules about something that isn't shaping how players read a game.

Sound goes straight to the subconscious in a way no other stimulus quite manages, and that's true across all entertainment, not just games. Try watching Jaws with the sound off. It isn't even half as frightening!

Used strategically, rather than as a nice-to-have layer on top, sound plays a major role in player engagement and retention. A successful game is a very carefully crafted "orchestration" of ebbs and flows: enough tension and anticipation to keep players leaning in, but not so much that it overstimulates them or causes ear fatigue, which is the point where they leave.

Most people think of slot audio as individual sounds, or groups of sounds. I think in systems and sub-systems. Take an anticipation event, from the first scatter landing to the moment the Free Spins or Bonus round triggers. That whole sequence is one self-contained ecosystem, where every sound exists to feed and balance the others while holding an overall equilibrium. That equilibrium is what makes a game feel stable, and stability is a big part of why players come back to it. Those small systems then combine into the overall sound of the game, which has to balance out in its own right, so the player feels safe and entertained across a long session.

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🎙️ How much can sound influence the way players perceive a game's mechanics and features?

I'd love to see it move further into Audio Direction. There's no shortage of talent in this industry. There are composers and sound designers producing genuinely excellent work for slots. What tends to be missing is the role above them: someone whose job is the whole sonic picture, deciding where each sound sits, how the systems interact, and what the game should feel like from the first spin to the last. That seat mostly doesn't exist yet, so it gets covered in pieces by people who already have full-time jobs.

That's the gap I want to fill, taking what I've learned across 250+ slots over the past decade and helping studios turn a set of great sounds into a great-sounding game. Those two things aren't automatically the same.

As an industry, I'm really proud to say we've conquered quality. Now it's time to conquer the strategic use of it.