The Chief Product Officer of leading online gaming provider Evolution says the company is increasingly looking for ways to speed up and add excitement to its baccarat offerings as players become increasingly disinterested in the traditional version of the game.
Speaking with Inside Asian Gaming at G2E in Las Vegas this week, Todd Haushalter outlined his fears that traditional baccarat was losing its appeal among younger players, who instead want their gameplay to be faster and with the opportunity for bigger wins.
It is with this mind that Evolution has developed new formats of the game such as Lightning Baccarat, Golden Wealth Baccarat and Prosperity Tree Baccarat, whereby some cards are designated multipliers prior to each hand and those multipliers then applied to the players’ win anytime a multiplier card is dealt into a winning hand.
“I often talk dramatically about baccarat – intentionally dramatically – during our internal discussions and I say, ‘We need to save baccarat and make it appealing to the next generation’,” Haushalter explains.
“I worry that some 25-year-old playing for the first time is thinking, ‘All I can win is even money? I can only win 8:1 on the tie? How am I ever going to get rich on this?’
“So we are actively trying to push these versions where you can bet small and win big. We’ve seen high adoption rates on that sort of product and that’s been interesting. Another change we’re seeing is that players want faster, faster, faster.
“Five years ago, players loved our squeeze baccarat game with all the teasing – which is no doubt still popular in Macau – but online it’s become much less popular. They all want our speed baccarat product which is around 20 seconds per round.”
Although baccarat remains Evolution’s most popular product in Asia and by a long way – Haushalter calls it the “600-pound gorilla” – the changing nature of player preferences has the company constantly striving to stay ahead of the curve, he explains.
And adding speed to its entire suite of games sits at the core of this online gaming “evolution”.
“It’s the same thing with roulette,” he continues. “There are three things we do and one is to look for areas where we can save time. Whereas in the past we mixed it up via a mixture of slow, medium and fast spins, well, fast spins take too long and the players don’t want it. Now we’re spinning the ball slower so it falls faster. Second, we are offering speed versions of the game with shortened betting times and other elements, and the third thing we’re doing is, in instances where we can’t really shorten the game, we try to find ways to amuse [players] during dead periods.
“Betting time is fine, because they’re busy placing bets, but then after betting time and before you have your final result we try to do amusing things, maybe add extra multipliers to the game or tease them with interesting camera angles to make it feel like it’s not so long, because speed is king these days.”
Founded in Europe in 2006 and one of the early movers in the live dealer space, Evolution has grown to become one of the largest B2B online casino service providers in the world with 18,000 staff and games run in 18 different languages.
It is also expanding into the United States with live studios now operational in four states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut – although 2023 represents just the second time the company has exhibited at G2E.
“We came last year for the first time and now we’ve doubled the size of our stand,” Haushalter explains. “The US has become our biggest slots market, which has sort of happened overnight. We’ve got thousands of employees in America now, so it has become a pretty sizable operation.
“The big story right now is that we’re bringing game shows to the US. Of course, we’ve got our card games here – blackjack, roulette, baccarat, craps – and we’ve got our slots, but the American market has never seen a game show and regulators here have never seen them either, so we’re super excited.
“It takes time to get them approved and they’re big studios to build – it’s a bit of an effort for us to take these things on – but that’s the big story. That’s what we’re revving up for.”
Asked what he sees as the next evolution for the online gaming world, Haushalter says, “We’ve got a big slots business and we’ve got a big live business – those two worlds need to come together. We want to bring the trust and the social elements of live and infuse those into slots.
“We’ve got a couple of different ways we’re thinking about it and I don’t know if it’s going to be the world’s biggest thing or not, but we’ve got to try. It’s about socializing the slot experience because it’s so solitary right now.
“I think that’s going to be one trend. I’m very mindful of the fact that we live in a TikTok world. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and we’re going to have a breed of games that considers the fact that players want to play fast because most of our games take a very long time relative to slots.
“That’s why we’re cooking up some pretty innovative stuff that is going to cater to these super short attention spans.”
RelatedPosts
