All about Merkur Gaming
Merkur Gaming is a big name in the worldwide gaming industry, but the company does not exist as an independent company. Instead, it is a wholly owned division of the giant German gaming conglomerate, the Gauselmann Group. Merkur is effectively Gauselmann’s games creation brand.
Merkur Gaming – A Brief Look At The Company
As with any such organisation, it is difficult to describe entities like Merkur without resorting to complicated corporate flow charts and dull ‘family tree diagrams’, which is not really what readers of a site about Nektan games really want… or just about anybody else really. So here follows a brief history, avoiding the need for charts, graphs and complex structures wherever possible…
Gauselmann, the brand’s owners, have been around for more than sixty years. They were founded by Paul Gauselmann back in 1957, and the company has remained a family run firm ever since. Today, the company is managed by the Gauselmann Family Foundation and its Board of Directors consists predominantly of family members.
It has not done badly for such a traditionally structured firm though, because it is one of the biggest names in the European and worldwide gaming industry. Today, this massive conglomerate employs close to 15,000 people, based in over forty countries across the globe. In 2019, the last year for which figures are available at the time of writing, the company posted total revenues of €2.5 billion. Approximately €1 billion of this income was derived from the company’s domestic German market. The remainder was earned internationally, predominantly throughout the European continent.
The company remains headquartered in the small town of Lubbecke, situated in the North Rhine-Westphalia region in northern Germany. The town lies around fifty miles west of the nearest major city, Hannover.
The focus of the company is on land based casino gaming. It is a major manufacturer and designer of the cabinet games found in today’s real world casinos. Online gaming therefore represents a logical extension of its main business.
Merkur is one of the Group’s game design brands. Others include the United Kingdom based Blueprint Gaming. Most of the focus of this division remains on its parent company’s real world game design, with Blueprint focusing more on the digital side of things. Any Merkur branded online slots are likely to have been derived from a land-based cabinet design.
The Merkur Gaming division is responsible for the employment of around five hundred people. Many of these are located close its owners’ north German headquarters, but Merkur also operate a number of internationally based games development offices. These are located all across the world, including Austria, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in Europe, India in Asia and the United States, Mexico and Peru in the Americas.
The online and digital sectors of the business, including its sports betting interests, are managed via the Merkur Interactive Services division, which is based in Berlin.
Merkur Games – Their Best Titles
Merkur Gaming have been around since the very beginning of online gaming, and were designing and manufacturing real world slot machines long before that. All this experience means that they have developed a formidable portfolio of close to two hundred different titles. Many of these are available to cabinet players only, but a significant number are issued in digital form too.
Merkur rarely feature amongst online players’ ‘favourite ever games’ lists, nor are they likely to be found on any top ten list of current hits (unlike their sister company Blueprint). But this should not mean that their games should be disregarded or considered inferior. This situation is more a function of their role within the Gauslemann corporate structure. Merkur are tasked with looking after the cabinet based side of designs, where the brand is very well known and highly regarded: land based players regularly rate Merkur games very highly.
The brand has games which cover all the regular slot genres and more, and many of these are available online too. Perhaps partly as a result of their long history, the brand is renowned primarily for its classic titles. This may also be a reason behind the prevalence of what is by far the brand’s favourite theme – the traditional fruit machine genre. There are dozens of examples in the range, so it is quite easy to get your five a day of citrus, Merkur style. You can try Cash Fruits, Diamond and Fruits, Frooty Temptation, Fruitinator and Fruits Tastylicious for starters and there are plenty more to test the taste buds where they came from.
The ancient Egyptian genre is another favourite of the Merkur design teams. Eye of Horus, Flames of Egypt, Nile Liner and Pyramid of Power are good examples of what is a prolific area for the brand. Other classic tiles which often feature amongst online casinos’ playlists are the Sherlock Holmes themed 221B Baker Street, Fishin’ Frenzy and Odin.
Other personal favourites include the impressive Arctic themed Snow Wolf Supreme and the fun to play Pirates Arrr Us! There are also a few traditional casino games in the Merkur armoury, including a variety of versions of Roulette.
Summary of Merkur Gaming
Whilst the Merkur Gaming brand will perhaps be more familiar to real world casino goers than to online players, there are a significant number of excellent slots that are available for United Kingdom based players to play. Their titles are regularly found on casinos powered by Nektan software, and all casino operators on this platform have access to Merkur games. Look out for them on your chosen Nektan casino.