Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | July 2011 50 Inspired Gaming Managing Director for Casino at Inspired Gaming, to learn more. IAG : What does Inspired Gaming have to offer Asian operators? Lee Gregory : We are the world leader in Open server-based gaming™. Our core value is multi-content. And our pedigree is we are a leading provider of video lottery terminal products in Italy and the United Kingdom. Our products and platforms in those territories have many tens of games. That means underpinning all of our products is a deep and configurable platform. We have up to 40 game developers writing games to our platform through a common and open API [application programming interface]. Beneath that API, Inspired has developed a platform that at the content and product level is highly configurable and highly flexible. At the deep platform level, back to the data centre, it allows transmission of high-quality data, content upload and download. I mentioned that because one of our core values is that almost everything we do is multi-content configurable. We have a system that enables operators to schedule content by time of day, by day of the week. In essence, with the Inspired platform you get the ability to configure your content and customise your content specifically to the requirements of your venue. In the case of roulette, for example, that means you can change your bet limits and schedule those changes according to what the data is telling you about play patterns at certain times of the week and certain times of the day. Tell us about the products you have at G2E Asia. We have what we call our Sabre hardware. We launched this product at the ICE show in January in London. We launched it with our Multi-Win Roulette content. We also have here in Macau our baccarat product for Sabre, Live E-Baccarat, which is new and being launched at this show, which is great news. The roulette configuration in the Sabre hardware is GLI compatible. The baccarat product hasn’t yet been through the GLI process. The predecessor to Sabre, Multi-Win Roulette 3, had a 19-inch, 4:3 aspect ratio screen. The all new Sabre slant top cabinet has a 26-inch full HD screen. We decided to design in that extra retail space on the screen for the benefit of the players. We took that decision based on our research of the play data. We looked at two key areas—the racetrack bets and the wheel analysis. As you will know, the racetrack is an alternative to the main roulette betting grid. It follows the layout of the roulette wheel itself and is shaped like a racetrack. On most electronic roulette products, the racetrack bets are usually accessed via a second screen or a separate button press. We mined our data on our estates and found that only in 0.5% of games played do players ever choose to press the secondary button and select the racetrack bet. The rest all look at the wheel results. When we created that extra retail space with the Sabre 26-inch HD screen, we decided to bring those racetrack elements of the game forward to the main screen. What the data was telling us—and we also did some focus groups with players—is that players like to play what they see. They don’t really want to go into second screens. Has that ability to ‘interrogate’ the data on your platform given you other insights for product development? There have been lots of eureka moments with players in research groups. We take opportunities to bring extra functionality into play. But we do try and maintain a ‘clean’ and relatively simple format because the user interface is a key feature of the product. It needs to be simple and clear. There are other suppliers in the market we In play—the four-wheel display on Inspired’s Multi-Win Roulette 4 Live E-Baccarat on Inspired’s new Sabre cabinet