Reel Star

About Reel Star

Harrison Barrett, VP of business development, spoke to the iGB team at iGB L!VE 2026 to discuss the evolution of Soft2Bet’s MEGA platform, which started out as a purely gamification layer but has become “much more compelling than simply leaderboards, missions and point-based rewards”.

As Barrett puts it, MEGA is “ultimately a retention tool that helps our partners move away from heavy bonus and costs”.

With ice hockey and UFC-themed initiatives driving engagement in North America and a 45% lifetime value increase seen with the launch of MEGA Shoot, a player-versus-player simulation penalty shootout game initiative which launched during the World Cup, it is an exciting time for the Malta-based platform provider.

What is Reel Star?

If it strikes a more reasonable balance that encourages economic development, “you will see the world’s best casino operators submit proposals”, he says. The government, he adds, must show it is prepared to give developers enough room to manage the risks of committing billions of dollars in capital.

Klebanow remains cautious about the commercial prospects of Japan’s emerging IR market, particularly given the tight limits on gaming capacity. With only five casinos ultimately envisaged, he argues that the number of gaming machines and tables will be modest relative to Japan’s population, making it “very safe to assume” that gambling will be socially and physically contained.

The bigger question, therefore, is whether such constraints will leave operators enough capacity to generate the returns needed to justify their investment.

How to play Reel Star

Trace2Trace is relatively new, but Madsen says its underlying dataset has already grown to around 620,000. And it continues to grow, highlighting the scale of illegal operations in the gambling industry.

“We receive around 7,000 domains a day on average through the lists we monitor, including new and cloned sites,” he explains.

The system starts with domains that have already been identified by authorities. Trace2Trace then crawls them, looking for technical connections and similarities.