Coinslot International
Coinslot International is a British trade publication for the pay-to-play leisure sector, the world long known as coin-op before electronic payment became widespread. Published weekly, with a double issue over the Christmas and New Year period, it serves the amusement and gaming machine industry from its base in London, covering arcades, pubs, bingo halls, casinos, betting shops and seaside resorts. First published as a separate title in 1974, it began life as a section of the World's Fair newspaper, and across five decades it has been more than a reporter of its industry: at the end of the 1990s, under its editor Chris Murphy, it led a successful campaign that changed the ownership history of the trade's own exhibition company, an episode still cited as evidence of the paper's influence.
Origins in the World's Fair newspaper
Coinslot originated as a section of World's Fair, the newspaper published by the eponymous publishing house based in Oldham, Greater Manchester, which served the fairground and amusement trades. The coin-operated amusement business, with its roots in travelling fairs, seaside arcades and pubs, was a natural part of that paper's territory. As the machine industry grew in scale and distinctiveness, the section became a title in its own right; Coinslot was first published separately in 1974. The timing was significant. The Betting and Gaming Act of 1960 had reshaped the legal landscape for gaming machines in Britain, arcades were a fixture of every seaside town, and the industry's manufacturers, distributors and operators needed a regular, dedicated source of news, which a weekly cycle, unusual in trade publishing, was designed to provide.
A weekly rhythm for a fast-moving trade
Most trade magazines publish monthly; Coinslot published weekly, with only the Christmas and New Year period combined into a double issue. That frequency reflected the character of its readership's business. Machine operators work to short cycles of collections, site changes and product performance; regulation and licensing questions can change quickly; and the trade's social and commercial life, its exhibitions, open days, auctions and company moves, generates news every week. A weekly paper could carry that flow in a way a monthly could not, and it made Coinslot the habitual read of the industry, arriving as part of the working week for operators, distributors and manufacturers across the United Kingdom. The weekly rhythm also gave the paper its campaigning character: a title that publishes every week can sustain pressure on an issue, as Coinslot famously demonstrated in 1999.
What Coinslot covers
The paper's territory is defined by the machine and the venue. Its issues of interest include amusement with prizes machines, known as AWPs or fruit machines; skill with prizes machines, known as SWPs or quiz machines; arcade games, including arcade video games; vending; redemption games, the ticket prize games such as Skee-Ball; children's rides; and simulators. Around those machine categories sits the estate in which they operate: bingo halls, casinos, betting shops, theme parks, pubs and members' clubs, together with gambling regulation and seaside tourism. That combination of product and place is the essence of the coin-op trade as Coinslot reports it. A change in machine regulation affects a pub's income and a seaside arcade's viability at once, and a new redemption game is simultaneously a product story, a supplier story and a story about the family venues competing for visitors.
The campaign of 1999 and the sale that followed
Coinslot's most celebrated episode came in 1999, when, edited by Chris Murphy, it successfully led the campaign against proposals by the US firm TOIC to purchase ATE from the industry's trade association, BACTA, the British Amusement Catering Trade Association. ATE was the organiser of ATEI, the UK trade's major exhibition, and its ownership mattered deeply to the industry it served. Many in the industry believed Coinslot played an instrumental part in blocking the sale. The story then took a remarkable turn: in 2000 the title was purchased by ATE Ltd itself, so that the exhibition company that Coinslot had helped keep in industry hands became the paper's owner. Few trade publications can claim to have shaped their own ownership in that way, and the episode established Coinslot's reputation as an independent voice willing to campaign on its readers' behalf.
From BACTA to Clarion to GB Media
The ownership history continued. BACTA eventually sold ATE in June 2005 for £13.5 million to Clarion Events, a deal that included Coinslot in the package. The paper was subsequently acquired by GB Media, the publisher of other leading gaming titles including iGaming Times and International Casino Review, for an undisclosed sum. Each change of owner placed Coinslot within a different publishing logic: first the fairground press of Oldham, then the industry's own exhibition company, then a large international events business, and finally a specialist gaming publisher where it sat alongside casino and interactive gaming titles. Through those changes the paper's core identity survived, because its value lay in a loyal, defined readership that owners wished to reach and a weekly title those readers trusted.
Pubs, machines and the economics of the local
A continuing theme of Coinslot's coverage is the importance of machine income to Britain's pubs. A feature in the magazine, highlighted by Regal Gaming Technologies in March 2025, had that company's director Matt Bicknell outlining what he described as an inevitable rationalisation of the machine supply chain, while emphasising the importance of income from amusement machines to the profit and loss of Britain's pub companies, in a context where figures showed six pubs closing each week during 2024. That is characteristic Coinslot territory: the intersection of a specialised supply chain with the economics of familiar high street businesses. For publicans and pub companies, machine income is a meaningful contribution to a threatened business model; for operators and suppliers, the pub estate is a core market; the paper speaks to both sides of that relationship.
Exhibitions and the international circuit
Coinslot's reporting follows its industry to its exhibitions, at home and abroad. Its pages carry show reports and interviews from the European exhibition circuit, including conversations with leading distributors about the opportunities presented by international trade shows, the products that caught visitors' attention, and the continuing effect of Brexit on trade with European Union buyers, who reported lower levels of business and increased costs and obstacles, while remaining positive about expanding the world of play with new products. Coverage of that kind positions the paper as more than a domestic bulletin. British manufacturers and distributors export worldwide, and British operators watch international product trends for the machines that will appear in their arcades and pubs; a trade paper that reports from Vienna and other show floors as readily as from London serves both audiences.
Regulation at the centre of the trade
No subject runs through Coinslot's history more persistently than gambling regulation. Its coverage list places gambling regulation alongside machine categories, and for good reason: the stake and prize limits for amusement with prizes machines, the rules for quiz machines and redemption, and the licensing of premises determine what the industry can sell and site. The paper's readers, from single-site operators to national companies, need regulation explained promptly and precisely, with its commercial consequences drawn out. Coinslot's weekly frequency and specialist focus made it a natural place for that reporting, and its willingness to campaign, proven in 1999, gave its regulatory coverage an edge that a purely descriptive publication would lack. In a sector where a regulatory review can reshape machine categories overnight, the paper functions as an early-warning system and a forum for the trade's response.
Seaside tourism and the arcade's home ground
Coinslot's inclusion of seaside tourism among its core subjects reflects the geography of British amusements. The seaside arcade is the industry's historic home ground, and the fortunes of arcades are bound up with those of the resorts that host them: their visitor numbers, their regeneration, their planning battles and their season. By covering seaside tourism alongside machines, the paper connects the trade to the wider economy of the coast, where family entertainment centres anchor piers and promenades and children's rides and redemption games are part of the holiday itself. That perspective, inherited from its beginnings in the fairground press of World's Fair, keeps Coinslot rooted in the places where pay-to-play leisure began, even as its coverage extends to casinos, betting shops and international exhibitions.
Place in the British amusement trade
Coinslot International holds a distinctive place in British trade publishing: a weekly paper, born in 1974 from a fairground newspaper, that became influential enough to help block the sale of its industry's exhibition company and then be bought by that company. Its subjects, fruit machines and quiz machines, redemption and rides, pubs and piers, bingo and betting shops, form a coherent world of pay-to-play leisure that few other titles attempt to cover whole. Under GB Media it sat alongside leading gaming publications, continuing to report the machine trade's product news, regulatory battles and commercial pressures, from the rationalisation of the supply chain to the weekly closure of the pubs its machines help sustain. For the operators, distributors and manufacturers who make up that trade, Coinslot has been, for five decades, the paper of record.
