Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming May 2014 56 Ballyhoo The new Bally-SHFL combination will be at G2E Asia showing what it’s got—and it’s more than Asia has ever seen under one roof G 2E Asia 2014 will be the region’s first look at the biggest Bally Technologies it’s ever seen, pumped with SHFL’s added muscle and eager to show a range of games and systems and supporting products and technologies that for sheer scale has no equal in the industry— everything from linked progressives and standalones to electronic multi-station and proprietary table games to table game utilities and displays to a state-of-the-art casino management system. It’s going to take a whopping 600 square meters of the floor at The Venetian Macao Convention & Exhibition Center to display it all. “It’s the biggest stand for either Bally or SHFL by a long shot,” says Ken Jolly, executive vice president of what is now the Asia subsidiary of Bally’s SHFL entertainment. “It’s very nicely branded. Very well-done. You’ll know who we are.” The new slots alone will number more than 100, and they will include more games developed specifically for Asia, and for Macau in particular, than Bally’s ever shown; which only makes sense when you look at the quarter ended 31st March, the most recent for the NYSE-listed slot giant and the first full quarter including SHFL’s results—34% of new unit sales were to customers outside the United States. Last year at this time it was 17%. And the influence of SHFL, as you’d expect, is becoming more pronounced. Sales of table products (utilities and proprietary games) generated 13% of the company’s record revenue of US$338.4 million for the quarter, up from 7% over the last three quarters combined. Bally is now a company with a larger installed base of PTGs than linked progressives. “G2E Asia is the perfect venue to showcase our full array of new content, including table games, since our acquisition of SHFL entertainment last November,” says Srini Raghavan, senior vice president of Asia, India, and South Africa. “Visitors to our booth will see that Bally is committed to serving the needs of the Asia-Pacific market.” This will be evident in an array of artfully themed new titles—Fu Dao Le, Super Red Phoenix, Super Rise of Ra, Fu Lion and Aztec Dawn among them—all featured on the innovative Alpha 2 Pro Wave, a cabinet unlike any on a casino floor, a sleek, almost liquid extension of Bally’s workhorse Alpha 2 Pro Series V32 with eight inches added to the portrait-style LCD touchscreen monitor in a player interface that curves inward a full 40 inches in height. The Asia focus is notable in the prominence of stacked symbols, in Fu Dao Le, for example, where they appear as game logos at first and then are revealed as a line or wild symbol, and with the Reel Blast concept incorporated in Aztec Dawn, a free games mystery feature in which reels 3 and 4 become a single big reel with one symbol covering 12 game spots on each of three reel sets. Block Pays is the name of the simple yet intriguing approach to symbols that lies at the heart of Emperor’s Seal, an all-new three-level linked progressive on SHFL’s robust Equinox cabinet that aims to build on the prodigious success of Duo Fu Duo Cai. Emperor’s Seal will debut at G2E Asia on top of Beijing Opera and Forbidden Beauty. Both are new, both obviously target the Chinese player, and how Block Pays works on both is that any stack of nine symbols pays a scatter prize regardless of whether they’re stacked right to left, as in most games. With substitute symbols on reel 5 the block also acts to trigger the jackpot feature, where the player tries to match three “Seals” of the same color, each color corresponding to a prize level. But the really captivating part is that as the player bets up, the more symbols they load on the reel. Betting maximum credits ensures it’s always the substitute, and then only a block of two reels is needed elsewhere on the screen. It’s a variation on the mechanics that have made Duo Fu Duo Cai the regional phenomenon that it is, notably in the similarities to the latter’sAll Up feature, where all lines are always in play even at minimum bet, and as you buy more “Gold” symbols you access a higher-paying scorecard with more chances at a progressive win. Emperor’s Seal, like Duo Fu Duo Cai, was conceived with Macau “front of mind,” “G2E Asia is the perfect venue to showcase our full array of new content since our acquisition of SHFL entertainment. Visitors to our booth will see that Bally is committed to serving the needs of the Asia-Pacific market.” Srini Raghavan , senior vice president of Asia, India, and South Africa Feature