2 By 2 Gaming: provider, licence, RTP and certified casinos

Key facts about the 2 By 2 Gaming games provider

• Origin: American slot studio based at 3030 Finely Road, Downers Grove, in the western suburbs of Chicago, led by Shridhar Joshi, former VP Global Product Strategy at WMS Gaming.
• First release: Pinocchio's Fortune, launched on 13 September 2014, followed by Spell of Odin on 15 November of the same year.
• Catalogue: 64 titles in the official portfolio, of which roughly 55 are actually distributed to online operators. The rest stayed on land-based cabinets.
• Licence: no B2B licence in the studio's own name, neither in the United Kingdom nor in Malta. Distribution runs through account 58841, held by Games Global Operations Limited with the UK Gambling Commission.
• Certification: random number generator audits and return-to-player checks are carried out by the laboratories listed on the regulator's register, not by the studio.
• Return to player: from 95% to 96.11%, with Spell of Odin in front, ahead of Giant Riches at 96.06% and Wolfheart at 96.02%.
• Speciality: video slots and steppers, those simulated mechanical reel machines that web-native studios almost always ignore.
• In-house mechanics: Mighty Gold, Mystery Stacks, manual reel stop and a player choice at the entrance to the bonus round.
• Unusual grids: Wolfheart and Giant Riches on eight reels with 60 fixed lines, Legends of Africa on a diamond-shaped screen.
• Patents: more than 65 granted and around 35 applications pending, for a team of fewer than ten people.
• Deliberate gaps: no live casino, no table game under its own brand, no crash game, no networked progressive jackpot and no demo version.
• Activity: last dated title in May 2018, website copyright frozen on 2019, catalogue still distributed but no new production spotted since.

2 By 2 Gaming: the Chicago studio that carried its slots from the casino floor to the screen

There is a category of company in this industry that never appears on a poster: the maths workshops. No marketing department, no loud booth at ICE, just a handful of people who spend their days tuning paytables and hit frequencies so that others can stamp their logo on the result. 2 By 2 Gaming belongs to that family, the video slots specialists whose name never shows up in large type in the lobby. The Downers Grove developer has signed titles that have been spinning for over a decade in regulated casinos around the world. The vast majority of players who set those reels in motion have never read its name.

The CASINO button at the top of this Kynox Casino page lists the operators certified and regulated in their own jurisdiction that carry the 2 By 2 Gaming catalogue. What follows explains what you will find there, and what you will not.

Who is 2 By 2 Gaming?

A first machine online on 13 September 2014

The date that matters, the only one backed by a verifiable launch record, is the first title deployed on a real money gaming platform: Pinocchio's Fortune, on 13 September 2014. Spell of Odin followed two months later, on 15 November 2014. From that autumn onwards, the developer's signature started appearing in the catalogues of licensed European operators.

2 By 2 Gaming already existed before that date, but in the world of cabinets and physical gaming floors, working as a subcontractor for machine manufacturers. That gap explains much of what you will read below. By the time the first titles reached the browser, the studio already had years of production behind it and a patent portfolio in place.

Shridhar Joshi, or what you learn from selling millions of Jackpot Party

The studio's official website tells a career worth reading. Shridhar Joshi started at WMS Gaming as the fourth employee of what was then an embryonic division, which he helped grow past 800 million dollars in revenue and into second place in the sector. He left with the title of VP Global Product Strategy and a credit list few designers can match: Jackpot Party, Life of Luxury, Powerball, Monopoly. He holds more than 45 patents in his own name.

This industrial lineage is not a footnote. WMS was absorbed by Scientific Games in 2013, a group that became Light & Wonder in 2022. Joshi and Darryl Hughes, head of development, both come from that school. It is the Williams Interactive school, where you design a payout mechanic first and add the artwork afterwards.

You feel the result the moment you start playing. When you launch one of their titles, you are playing a land-based casino machine ported to a browser. You are nowhere near a product built for a phone and then stretched back onto a big screen. The controls, the pace of the reels, the way wild symbols substitute, everything keeps the deliberate stiffness of a physical cabinet.

A tiny team with an outsized patent portfolio

The developer claims close to 125 years of combined experience, more than 65 granted patents and around 35 applications pending. Crunchbase places the headcount in the 1 to 10 employee bracket. The ratio between those two figures sums the place up rather well: very few people, a great deal of intellectual property.

The stated line-up is that of a classic industry workshop. Designers who follow market trends, 2D and 3D artists, illustrators and animators, award-winning composers, programmers specialised in gaming technology, and a maths unit dedicated to payout models. That last group is the studio's real asset, the one that calibrates the return to player, the variance and how often free spins trigger.

Under which licence are 2 By 2 Gaming games offered?

The studio holds no B2B licence in its own name

An error circulating in several directories needs correcting here. British licence number 58841 is regularly attributed to 2 By 2 Gaming. A check in the public register of the UK Gambling Commission shows that this account belongs to Games Global Operations Limited, registered at 62 Circular Road, Douglas, Isle of Man, holder of the Gambling Software (Remote) and Game Host Casino (Remote) licences, active since 15 February 2022.

I took the verification further. As of 15 September 2026, there is no supply licence in the name of 2 By 2 Gaming in the United Kingdom, none in Malta, and no trace of the developer in the public registers of the New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania regulators. The finding is clear. 2 By 2 Gaming is not a directly licensed supplier. It is a content creator whose real money games travel under the regulatory umbrella of its distributors.

Games Global and Quickfire, the real regulatory pillar

Historically, the studio's gateway to online play was the Quickfire platform, built by Microgaming and sold to Games Global in 2022. Titles reach licensed operators through that aggregation channel, via a single back-office integration, and it is the aggregator's licence that carries the entire technical compliance burden. That means random number generator certification, an independent laboratory audit of the return to player, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction approval and full traceability of gaming sessions.

The Games Global corporate site confirms this position as aggregator and distributor on behalf of third-party studios, with a catalogue fed by more than fifty development partners.

Which laboratories actually test 2 By 2 Gaming slots?

Since compliance runs through the aggregator, the games are audited by the laboratories approved by the regulator of the market concerned. In the United Kingdom, the Gambling Commission maintains a public register of approved test houses. Fourteen organisations appear on it: eCOGRA, iTech Global Pty Limited (iTech Labs), BMM Testlabs, Quinel M. Ltd, Trisigma B.V., QALabs, the Slovenian institute SIQ, Expleo Technology UK, Gaming Associates Europe and the five entities of the Gaming Laboratories International group (GLI LLC, GLI Europe, GLI Austria, GLI Test Labs Canada, GLI UK Gaming).

These laboratories do more than confirm that the random number generator produces unpredictable sequences. They also check that the advertised return to player matches the machine's real behaviour across several million simulated spins, that display rules are respected, that interrupted sessions are handled properly, and that the game behaves correctly when the network drops.

eCOGRA, the oldest body in the sector

Founded in London in 2003, eCOGRA is the veteran of the profession. The organisation is accredited to ISO/IEC 17025, 17020, 17065 and 17021-1 by UKAS, the British accreditation body, and it is recognised as an approved laboratory in twenty-eight jurisdictions: Great Britain, Malta, Alderney, Gibraltar, Isle of Man, Jersey, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia, Switzerland, Colombia, Argentina (province and city of Buenos Aires), the Philippines, Kahnawake, New Jersey and Ontario.

In practice, the seal you are looking for is not on the game. It sits with the operator and with the platform that supplies it. That is the only verifiable chain of trust.

What this means for you in practice

Three practical consequences, and none of them are trivial.

• Compliance: the guarantee does not come from the developer but from the pairing of a licensed operator and a licensed aggregator. Check the casino's licence, never the studio's.
• Availability: a 2 By 2 Gaming title only appears in a market if the aggregator is approved there. That is why catalogues vary so widely from one jurisdiction to the next.
• Recourse: if a dispute arises over a spin, your contact is the operator, then its regulator. The studio has no player support desk.

What does the 2 By 2 Gaming game library contain?

How many games exactly?

The portfolio page on the official website lists 64 titles, from Almighty Fortune to Agent Valkyrie. Online distribution records count roughly 55 actually available at operators, the difference being productions that stayed confined to land-based cabinets or social gaming apps. A significant share of the portfolio, around a third, has never left the physical world.

Almost exclusively video slots

The 2 By 2 Gaming catalogue leans heavily towards five-reel video slots, with a marked preference for three thematic families: Norse and Celtic mythology (Spell of Odin, Valkyrie Returns, Celtic Goddess, Wolfheart), Asian imagery (Ming Dynasty, Fei Lian Fortune, Mandarin Fortune, Asian Warriors Qian Lun, Fiery Kirin) and the reworked fairy tale (Pinocchio's Fortune, Hansel and Gretel Treasure Trail, Humpty Dumpty Wild Riches, Snow Queen Riches).

Two branded licences stand apart from the rest: Frasier and The Honeymooners, both American television series. A curious choice for an outfit of this size, and one more sign of how rooted it is in the North American land-based market.

The stepper format, the studio's least known signature

Here is the point nobody raises, and it deserves saying: 2 By 2 Gaming builds steppers. A stepper is a machine whose mechanical reels are simulated on screen, with a physically limited number of symbols per strip, unlike the classic video slot where the strips are purely virtual. The feel is drier, the win tiers easier to read, the nostalgia fully assumed.

The homepage carousel showcases Cash Jackpot Hitz 2 in a version explicitly labelled Stepper, fitted with an Xtra Win feature. It is a niche that web-native studios almost always skip, and it places 2 By 2 Gaming far closer to historic cabinet makers such as IGT, Aristocrat or Barcrest than to its contemporaries on the web.

Wolfheart and Giant Riches, the two eight-reel exceptions

These two titles drop the standard five-reel template for an eight-reel grid with 60 fixed paylines. Wolfheart, released on 16 June 2016, posts a return to player of 96.02% and a win cap of 4000x the stake. Giant Riches, out six weeks later on 27 July 2016, climbs to 96.06% for a cap of 1200x. Legends of Africa pushes the grid experiment further still with a diamond-shaped screen, a configuration you will hardly find anywhere else.

RTP and volatility: two ideas not to confuse

Return to player, or RTP, measures what a machine gives back statistically across a very large number of spins. Volatility describes how those wins are spread out. High volatility means long dry sessions punctuated by big payouts. Low volatility means frequent, modest returns. Two slots can post the same RTP and deliver radically different sessions.

At 2 By 2 Gaming, the available figures point to a consistent policy. The developer sits calmly around the 96% mark and never chases the extremes that make headlines.

Two lessons here. First, the early titles drag the average down: 95% and 95.05% for the first launches against 96.1% for those that followed, which suggests the payout policy was recalibrated around 2015. Second, the studio covers a wide variance range, from the gentle profile to high volatility slots such as Agent Valkyrie or Wizard of the Woods, something the official site states in plain terms.

The in-house mechanics

The developer builds its sales pitch on original mathematical models rather than visual one-upmanship, and it owns that choice right down to its communication. Several proprietary features recur from one title to the next: Mighty Gold, a system of reels that expand vertically mid-spin, and the Mystery Stacks of Medusa's Golden Gaze, which stack hidden symbols revealed all at once once the strips settle.

Several slots also hand the player a decision at the entrance to the bonus round, choosing between fewer free spins with a high multiplier or the reverse. That is a volatility against frequency trade-off most studios now reserve for their premium games. Finding it in a 2014 catalogue says a lot about where the designers came from.

You also come across a manual reel stop function. It is a direct inheritance from physical cabinets, alongside house suffix series that give the portfolio its shape: Maximum Fireballs on Ming Dynasty, Jackpot Hitz on two titles, Frosty Wins on Wild Force. This is the grammar of a cabinet manufacturer transposed straight onto the browser.

What 2 By 2 Gaming does not offer

Best said plainly, because it is every bit as useful as the list of strengths. The catalogue contains no live casino games, no dealer-hosted tables and, logically, no game shows. No crash games, no instant dice games, no roulette and no blackjack under the studio's own brand, since table game conversion is a service sold to third parties rather than an in-house range. No networked progressive jackpots either. Win caps are fixed and expressed in multiples of the stake.

Finally, no title is offered as a demo. The studio makes no practice mode available, which is why no playable game appears on this Kynox page.

Who does 2 By 2 Gaming work with?

Platform and aggregator partners

The services page on the official website names the real money distribution platforms directly: Quickfire, OpenBet, Lega, Amaya, Multislot and WorldMatch. That is a fairly broad aggregator network for an outfit of this size, and it explains a recorded presence in more than 80 countries.

The industry partners displayed on the site

The homepage shows ten partner logos: ODDSworks, Incredible Technologies, Galaxy Gaming, SGT (Skill Game Technologies), Gaming Arts, Primero, Ruby Seven Studios, Rolling Coin, ZVKY Design and Ingenuity Gaming. On the land-based side you can add Bally Technologies, Alfastreet and Bluberi, for whom the studio has converted physical machines into browser format.

This porting work deserves attention, because it puts 2 By 2 Gaming in an unusual position. The studio is both the creator of its own titles and a technical contractor for other manufacturers, a hybrid model few companies run.

The operators that carry the 2 By 2 Gaming catalogue

The official site and distribution records point to a presence at William Hill, Bet365, Mr Green, Unibet, BetVictor and Stan James. On the social gaming side, the games run on Facebook, iOS, Android and Kindle through the Mega Fame Casino and TropWorld apps.

How compatible are the games today?

The first titles were built in Flash. That technology was dropped by every browser at the end of 2020. The online catalogue was ported to HTML5, which guarantees responsive rendering on desktop, tablet and phone with nothing to install. There is no native app from the studio. You reach the machines from the operator's lobby, in the browser, and your session carries across devices because the game state is held server-side.

Be aware that the oldest titles visibly show their age. Original resolutions, dense interfaces, buttons sized for a mouse: on a recent phone screen, several 2014 and 2015 machines will test your patience.

Is the 2 By 2 Gaming studio still active?

I will be direct, because this is the question that really matters before you pick a casino on the strength of this catalogue. The signs of life are weak. The last dated title I could establish is Agent Valkyrie, May 2018. The official site's copyright is frozen on 2019. No news section, no recent press release, no partnership announcement since the end of the previous decade. The declared headcount fits in one room.

That does not mean the company has closed. A patent workshop can live perfectly well on licence royalties and porting contracts without ever publishing a line. But if you want a developer that feeds lobbies with new releases every quarter, this is not where to look. It would be dishonest to let you believe otherwise. What 2 By 2 Gaming offers is a solid, steady back catalogue, with neither genius nor disaster in it, the kind of slots you launch late in the evening once you have run through the week's releases. That is exactly how I use them myself. Spell of Odin is an excellent machine for emptying your head, and I ask nothing more of it.

How does 2 By 2 Gaming compare with studios of the same profile?

To judge a developer fairly you have to measure it against its real peers, not against the giants of the sector. Three studios share its DNA: small team, land-based origin, distribution through an aggregator, niche catalogue.

Lightning Box, the twin that never stopped

The most instructive comparison is with Lightning Box Games, and it is almost uncanny. The Australian studio was founded by mathematicians who came out of Aristocrat and IGT, exactly as 2 By 2 Gaming was founded by a WMS veteran. Both houses built their offer on original payout models rather than on graphics. Both took the Quickfire channel to reach online operators. And both worked for Incredible Technologies, the same cabinet manufacturer.

That is where the symmetry ends. Lightning Box shows 102 games on its site against 64 in the 2 By 2 Gaming portfolio, and above all the Sydney studio is still feeding lobbies in 2026, following its acquisition by Scientific Games on 4 August 2021. Its current client list covers BetMGM, FanDuel, Caesars, DraftKings, PokerStars, the Pennsylvania Lottery and Loto-Québec. Same starting recipe, two opposite trajectories.

Volume is not the right indicator

Crazy Tooth Studio, founded in 2011 in Reno, Nevada, has published only around twenty titles in fifteen years. That is three times fewer than 2 By 2 Gaming. Yet this studio still ships machines, including a Dungeons & Dragons licence, and runs its own development platform called INCISOR. What separates a living catalogue from a dormant back catalogue is therefore not the number of games. It is the work done in continuity.

Old Skool Studios, based in Vancouver since 2010, brings the last comparison point, and the most awkward one for 2 By 2 Gaming. The Canadian studio holds its own licence with the UK Gambling Commission. It localises its games into twenty-four languages. Two guarantees the Illinois studio does not offer, at a comparable team size.

What the Kynox Casino comparison tells you before you pick a casino

2 By 2 Gaming remains the best stocked of the four by title count, with an average return to player in line with the market and a genuine stylistic signature, that of the stepper and the gaming floor machine carried over as it was. But it is also the only one of the four to carry three handicaps at once. No licence in its own name, no documented localisation, and no production spotted since 2018.

Put simply, play these slots for what they are. They are an honest, dated back catalogue. Do not build your casino choice around them. Choose the operator first, on its licence and on the strength of its aggregator. Treat the presence of 2 By 2 Gaming as a pleasant extra, not as a criterion.

Where to find online casinos that offer 2 By 2 Gaming?

The CASINO filter at the top of this Kynox page gives you the list of operators certified and regulated in their own jurisdiction that carry the studio's catalogue.

One last piece of method. Given the distribution architecture described above, whether an operator carries 2 By 2 Gaming titles depends directly on its aggregation contract with Games Global. If the catalogue interests you, first verify that the operator lists the aggregator, and only then look at which machines are available in your jurisdiction. You can also explore comparable developers in our casino providers directory, where land-based studios brought online, Ainsworth among them, form a family that sits naturally alongside this one.

For any business enquiry, the studio can still be reached at 3030 Finely Road, Suite 120, Downers Grove, IL 60515, by phone on (331) 777-9970 or at [email protected].

FAQ: 2 By 2 Gaming

What is 2 By 2 Gaming?

2 By 2 Gaming is an American slot development studio based in Downers Grove, in the western suburbs of Chicago. It designs games for land-based casinos, real money online casinos and social gaming platforms. Its first online title, Pinocchio's Fortune, was released on 13 September 2014.

The studio claims more than 65 granted patents and around 125 years of combined experience within a team of fewer than ten people.

Are 2 By 2 Gaming games licensed?

2 By 2 Gaming games are distributed under the licence of the aggregator Games Global Operations Limited, holder of account 58841 with the UK Gambling Commission. The studio holds no B2B licence in its own name, neither in the United Kingdom nor in Malta. Compliance therefore rests with the operator and its aggregator.

Technical audits, covering random number generator certification and return-to-player verification, are carried out by the bodies listed on the approved laboratory register of the relevant regulator.

Where can you play 2 By 2 Gaming games?

2 By 2 Gaming games are available at online casinos certified and regulated in their own jurisdiction that have integrated the Games Global catalogue. The CASINO filter at the top of this page lists those casinos. Nothing needs installing, because the titles run in HTML5 in the browser, on desktop and mobile alike.

What is the return to player on 2 By 2 Gaming games?

The return to player on 2 By 2 Gaming slots sits between 95% and 96.11%. Spell of Odin leads the field at 96.11%, ahead of Giant Riches at 96.06% and Wolfheart at 96.02%. The oldest titles, such as Pinocchio's Fortune, drop to 95%. The catalogue average therefore stays within market norms, with no excess and no notable underperformance.

What are the best known 2 By 2 Gaming games?

The most widely distributed 2 By 2 Gaming titles are Spell of Odin, Wolfheart, Giant Riches, Agent Valkyrie, Medusa's Golden Gaze, Riches of the Sea, Magic of Pandora and Pinocchio's Fortune. The library also includes two television brand licences, Frasier and The Honeymooners.

How many games has 2 By 2 Gaming developed?

The official 2 By 2 Gaming portfolio holds 64 titles. Around 55 of them are actually distributed to online operators, the rest having stayed confined to land-based casino cabinets or social gaming apps.

Can you play 2 By 2 Gaming games in demo mode?

No. 2 By 2 Gaming makes no demo version available. Its games can therefore only be played for real money, at an operator that has integrated the catalogue. That is why no playable game appears on this Kynox Casino page.

Who founded 2 By 2 Gaming?

2 By 2 Gaming was founded by Shridhar Joshi, formerly of WMS Gaming where he was the fourth employee of the gaming division. He held the post of VP Global Product Strategy there and worked on Jackpot Party, Life of Luxury, Powerball and Monopoly. He holds more than 45 patents in his own name.

Darryl Hughes, also from Williams Interactive, leads development at the studio.

Does 2 By 2 Gaming offer live casino games?

No. The 2 By 2 Gaming catalogue contains no live casino games, no dealer tables, no game shows, no crash games and no networked progressive jackpots. The studio produces video slots and steppers exclusively, with fixed win caps.

Is 2 By 2 Gaming still releasing new games?

The last dated 2 By 2 Gaming title is Agent Valkyrie, released on 23 May 2018. The official site carries a copyright frozen on 2019 and publishes no news. The existing catalogue is still distributed to operators, but no new production has been spotted since.

Sources:

• 2 By 2 Gaming, official website
• 2 By 2 Gaming, About Us page
• 2 By 2 Gaming, game portfolio
• 2 By 2 Gaming, services page
• UK Gambling Commission public register, account 58841
• UK Gambling Commission public register of approved test houses
• eCOGRA, official website
• eCOGRA, encyclopaedia entry
• Games Global, corporate website
• Lightning Box Games, About page
• Light & Wonder, press release on the Lightning Box acquisition
• Crazy Tooth Studio, official website
• Old Skool Studios, SoftGamings supplier profile
• Crunchbase, 2By2 Gaming profile