Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming January 2015 10 Feature In Focus to family outings in Macau, which amazes him still when he thinks about the massive changes that gaming has wrought on a city that still bore the sleepy trappings of its colonial past when he first set foot in it. He recalls, “I’d been back two or three times with customers from Australia, and it hadn’t gotten much further than the first big casino you see when you get off the ferry, and I hadn’t seen the rest of the development that had taken place until I came up earlier this year. The thing that’s really bowled us over is the scale of what has happened, and the speed with which it’s happened, and the quality, and it’s really the quality thing that made us sit up and go, ‘Wow!’” He’s joined Aristocrat on the heels of a banner year marked by an 11.5% surge in global EBITDA on revenues that grew by 7% over 2013 to more than A$870 million. The leadership the company enjoys in East Asia was a big part of the story, and when he looks across the region, at markets in the throes of transformation such as the Philippines, he’s doubly confident in the company’s prospects. “As an Australian resident outside gaming I had no idea,” he remarks. “I knew about Macau, and I guess I’ve always had a special interest in Macau. But amazing things are happening in Manila, the development that’s happening now. There’s a lot going on.” Which touches on something about the larger strategy discussion he finds especially appealing: the sizable investment the company makes in reaching across different market segments with games that embody a whole different development paradigm—lines like the E*Series—designed in partnership with the likes of Joe Kaminkow of IGT fame and Dan Marks, one of the founders of High 5 Games. The E*Series boasts six colorfully themed titles currently available on the workhorse Viridian Wide Screen, all graphically rich and engineered for fun, accessibility and time on device. They include Sky Rider, which takes Aristocrat’s popular Max Stacks technology—stacked symbols added to the reels on each spin, with both the symbol and stack generated randomly—and spices it up with a bit of 5 Dragons math in the form of selectable free games. Another is Storm Queens, which offers a less volatile experience that innovates on Max Stacks with an oversized block symbol that unlocks the feature when it appears on reels 2, 3 and 4 and can combine with stacked symbols on the ends to fill the screen. “We’ve got this great collection of creative geniuses who produce this great content for us,” says Mr Kelly. “And we’ve been able to accommodate their creativity and their genius within the confines of a corporation, which is not always easy to do. I guess this is like, from my previous life, having your own in-house advertising agency.” It’s a life he believes has prepared him well for ensuring at his end that the creativity rolls on. As he puts it, “The older you get the more you realize that your success is determined by the success of your team. … You will undoubtedly not know as much about the product, the customers, the market, the players, as they do. But you don’t have to on Day 1. Because if you’re lucky like me and you’re surrounded by a whole group of people who really know their markets, really know their products, really know their customers, really know their players, really know their regulations, you can learn, and you can also concentrate on helping them to be the best that they can and do the job for their customers and their stakeholders in the best way possible. Hopefully, that’s something I can share with them.” “If you’re lucky like me and you’re surrounded by a whole group of people who really know their markets, really know their products, really know their customers, really know their players, you can learn, and you can also concentrate on helping them to be the best that they can.. Hopefully, that’s something I can share with them.”