Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | June 2008 50 markets with significant volumes of play,you actually have situations where people aren’t able to play the game they want to because cash cans are literally too full or because the printers have run out of paper. In those cases the industry has migrated the problems we used to have in handling coins to a different part of the game.” Bally iVIEW™ Some forms of operator-to-machine communication, such as cash can alerts, are automated and require no involvement from casino patrons. Others are about increasing player comfort, choice and product awareness. With Bally CMS, the channel for this communication is Bally iVIEW. “Bally iVIEW is essentially a distribution channel,” says Mr Rowe. “It allows us tomove content to and from a digital gaming device.” Marketing as content In this digital world,‘content’includes not just server-based games, but also marketing messages. “This is where we’re able to differentiate the marketing experiences at the game. Things that we used to do via a mailbox or in another part of the casino—whether it be promotions or customised offers based on the value of the customer—can be done via tier or type of customer at the game,” explains Mr Rowe. Losers become winners “Second ways to win is something that operators are really starting to compete on. The idea of using your system across all your games is to create the same experience on every game regardless of who the manufacturer is. You can differentiate by creating loyalty to your brand as opposed to the game they’re playing. Games are going to come and go over time, but your business is going to be there and your system is going to be there. “We want to be able to create second ways to win that create loyalty to an operator’s property. And in the event that players are potentially losing on their The problem with the latter category is that attractive attributes can be so revolutionary that consumers haven’t even conceived of the need for them. When was the last time you used the ‘player cam’ function on your digital television or set top box while watching a sports broadcast? Yet when Sky Sports introduced this feature to the United Kingdom TV market in 1999 as part of a package of interactive functionality, the broadcaster won a Royal Television Society Award for innovation. As Mr Rowe suggests, some gaming machine innovations will make perfect sense in the planning stage, but may not work so well on the casino floor. Brainpower Outside the gaming industry, businesses planning expensive product launches with high fixed production costs go to extreme lengths to guarantee consumer acceptance. Some research companies rely not only on verbal reporting, which has inherent bias andmargins of error,but onmeasuring users’ brain activity when using new products. One of the advantages of Bally SMS, says the company, is that functionality can be added or adjusted without the need for expensive re-tooling. Communication “As we start to think about networked floor capability, the definition we use in Bally is that what we’re moving to is the ability to communicate dynamically, on demand and bi-directionally, with gaming devices. In the past we’ve only been able to ‘listen’ to those gaming devices,” says Mr Rowe. “The question is: how does it add value?” he adds. “Many of the things we are trying to do involve differentiating the operator’s brand by service. An example is getting the right employees to the right customers at the right time with the right skills. As the global industry increasingly moves to ticket-in/ ticket-out with slots, the ability to know when to empty the cash cans and when to fill the printers is critical. Today, in some