Big Time Gaming

Yes — and that matters more than it sounds. Big Time Gaming was founded in 2011 in Sydney by Nik Robinson, Huw McIntosh and Ian Schmidt, three veterans of the Australian poker-machine industry who left Aristocrat to build online pokies on their own terms. BTG is the only meaningful game studio of its size that was founded in Australia, and the entire Megaways engine that has become the defining pokies mechanic of the last decade was developed out of Sydney. Even after the Evolution group acquisition in 2021, the studio remains Sydney-based with the core founding team still involved.

Megaways is a variable reel engine invented by Big Time Gaming that changes the number of symbols on each reel randomly on every spin, generating up to 117,649 ways to win in a single game round. BTG first deployed it in Dragon Born in 2015 and commercialised it at scale with Bonanza in 2016, then began licensing the Megaways engine to other studios — including Red Tiger, NetEnt, Blueprint, Pragmatic Play and iSoftBet. That is why you see "Megaways" on pokies made by studios other than BTG itself. BTG earns a licensing fee on every Megaways title shipped by a partner studio, which is a significant part of the business alongside its own game catalogue.

Yes — BTG pokies run at most Australian-facing offshore casinos without the supplier-level restrictions that hit [NetEnt](/game-studios/netent) progressive jackpots. Bonanza Megaways, The Dog House Megaways, Extra Chilli and White Rabbit are all widely deployed at SoftSwiss-powered AU-facing sites. The studio does not maintain a separate AU exclusion list on its core catalogue, so if a casino runs BTG content at all, Australian players typically have full access to it.

Commercially BTG is now part of the [Evolution Gaming](/game-studios/evolution-gaming) corporate group, which completed its acquisition for approximately €220 million in 2021. Operationally the Sydney studio remains the creative hub — BTG's Sydney office still ships new Megaways titles and the Megaways licensing business still runs out of Australia. The founding team is still involved at the creative level. So the company is Australian in origin, Australian in studio operations, and Swedish in corporate ownership.

BTG's own Megaways titles tend to have the tightest production values and the most distinctive art direction — Bonanza and White Rabbit especially are widely considered the benchmark for the format. Red Tiger and NetEnt Megaways pokies are visually polished but mechanically more conservative. Pragmatic Play Megaways pokies generally ship with higher variance and bigger max win caps but looser Megaways integration. For Australian players wanting the purest Megaways experience, starting with BTG's original catalogue is a reasonable rule of thumb.