Mike Waizman

Mike, you've built a whole thesis around Brainrot and viral culture. Do you think this is a sustainable long-term shift in player behavior, or are we simply riding a 12–24 month trend that could collapse as quickly as it appeared?

I don’t think Brainrot itself is the long-term shift. Brainrot is just the current language. The deeper shift is that players now expect casino content to feel native to the internet culture they already consume every day.

Five or ten years ago, a slot could win attention through theme, math model, and visual polish alone. Today, that’s not enough. Players are surrounded by TikTok edits, meme formats, short-form storytelling, absurd humor, and instant visual hooks.

Their attention has been trained differently. So if we only look at Brainrot as a meme aesthetic, yes, it may peak and fade. But if we look at it as a signal of where entertainment is going, then it’s much bigger than a 12–24 month trend.

For NGM Game, the thesis is not “let’s make meme slots forever.” The thesis is that iGaming content needs to become more culturally responsive, faster, and more emotionally recognizable. Brainrot is one expression of that. Tomorrow it may be another format, another language, another absurd subculture.

The providers who learn how to translate internet-native behavior into playable casino products will have an advantage beyond one trend cycle. 2/2

You're projecting a huge opportunity, since there are almost no competitors in this niche yet. What scares you more: competitors copying the idea, or players getting bored with the meme itself before the market has time to mature?

Competitors copying the idea doesn’t scare me that much. In fact, if competitors start copying it, that probably means we were right about the direction. The harder part is not putting a meme on top of a slot.

Anyone can do that. The hard part is understanding why something feels viral, why it feels stupid in the right way, why people share it, and how to turn that into a game that still performs commercially. What scares me more is lazy execution – not from us specifically, but from the market overall.

If everyone treats Brainrot as just a skin, players will get bored very quickly. They’ll see through it. Internet culture has a very low tolerance for brands that arrive late and try too hard.

So the real risk is not that the meme dies. Memes always die. The risk is failing to build a production mindset that can move with culture instead of chasing yesterday’s joke.

At NGM Game, we’re not betting on one character, one meme, or one viral format. We’re betting on speed, creative instinct, and the ability to package familiar online emotions into casino mechanics. That is much harder to copy than a visual style.

Looking at the industry today, many studios are trying to become “TikTok-native.” In 3 years, what do you think we'll call this trend? A new category of iGaming products, or just another marketing buzzword we all got excited about for a while?

I think “TikTok-native” will disappear as a term, but the behavior behind it will stay. In three years, we probably won’t call it TikTok-native anymore because the platform itself won’t be the point. The point will be that casino games will need to compete inside a much broader entertainment environment.

For a long time, iGaming studios mostly compared themselves with other iGaming studios. But players don’t live in that bubble. They compare our games with everything else on their screen: reels, streams, mobile games, influencers, memes, live content, and whatever new format appears next.

That changes what a slot has to do in the first three seconds. It changes how we think about characters, sound, pacing, bonus reveals, and even thumbnails. So yes, some companies will use “TikTok-native” as a buzzword.

That always happens. But underneath the buzzword, I believe a real category is forming: internet-native casino content. Not just games marketed on social platforms, but games designed with the logic of modern digital culture from day one.

The winners won’t be the studios that say “we understand TikTok.” The winners will be the studios that understand attention, humor, speed, remixability, and community behavior, and can still build a strong gambling product underneath it. That’s where I think the market is going.