Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | April 2009 22 WMS MONOPOLY Grand Hotel Big Event game on a BLUEBIRD2 displayed at the International Gaming Expo in London recently, is how beautifully clear and simple the game is. This may well be a selling point in a market such as Macau, where a common observation heard particularly from market research surveys of mainland Chinese visitors is that multi-line games are hard for newcomers to understand at first. “My three-reel machines in Macau are certainly very successful,” says Mr Gribble. “Apart from the button legends, it’s American-style, with the number 7s and bars. They’re very easy to understand. “At G2E Asia, the BLUEBIRD2 cabinet will be used to demonstrate our network gaming offer. We’ll have a selection of all the different categories of product we offer on that cabinet,” explains Mr Gribble. Local appetite He adds machine replacement cycles are typically shorter in venues catering for local players compared to those hosting outsiders. “If you’re a casino aimed at the local market, you’re going to have to keep the floor fresh,”he explains.“But if you’re focused on a more transient market, you can hold on to the product a little longer. We are in Mocha [Clubs in Macau], for example, and working hard to build our performance there. “They have a very strong locals crowd. They are constantly busy working the floors and we’re there to help them,” states Mr Gribble. Insight “Part of what I’ve been doing in the past year is building my understanding of the player market in order to provide the product configured correctly to meet their expectations. And I know we are having an impact at several of the sites. We are working now on product concepts and variations. We are even looking at the Orion product for them.” So far, the only place in Macau where players have the chance to see Orion games is in theWMS showroomand in an occasional test bank of machines in a casino. “We’ve just completed our configurations and specifications for Orion products right for the market. I’m a little careful about that stuff. You want it to work. You’ve got to give it the best possible chance,” states Mr Gribble. “We have a common platformwith Orion and share an OS [operating system] to a certain level—although not completely. You can’t just swap a WMS game into an Orion cabinet,” he explains. Branding “Orion products have a differentiation from WMS games. The Orion designers explore and focus on different areas of game theme and design than the WMS designers. We’re quite careful to make sure they don’t clash,” he says. Mr Gribble is also hopeful about picking upWMS sales in the Singapore casinomarket when it goes live late this year. “We have some exposure to the Singapore market through cruise ships, and of course we have sales at Genting [Highlands in Malaysia],”states Mr Gribble. WMS will be represented by RGB for sales at Resorts World at Sentosa, while Mr Gribble will deal directly with LVS at Marina Bay Sands. “We certainly expect there’ll be demand for our product in Singapore, and we’re very positive in general about our prospects for the rest of 2009,” he adds. Stuart Gribble MONOPOLY Grand Hotel Big Event An Orion game