Inside Asian Gaming

July 2011 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 51 feel have designed their products to be a little bit more ‘artistic’. But I think they’re not as intuitive. We’ve got a really intuitive player interface. Other suppliers say they mine data to assist product development. Is Inspired Gaming doing something different? We have dedicated data miners with sophisticated tools. They work on our products, with our retail customers. They will look for trends, for play sessions, for analysis around content, hot and cold sessions by day, and will work with our client base. They will advise on strategies for time of day. For example, during peak demand you may want to withdraw lower stake options on a game then reactivate them during slower periods. Or at certain times you may want to offer multi-stake content. It’s a real value add for the operator to be able to do this. It’s a value-add function we have developed out of our UK and Italian businesses over the last two years. Is the data mining a value-add service or part of the core offer? With our contracted retail partners in markets where we operate revenue share, it’s part of the overall contract.Where customers buy terminals from us outright, we offer that as a sort of value-add service which they can buy. We have a deal in the pipeline where we’re selling terminals outright. We are offering the customer a couple of quarterly deep dives into the data. We’ll dive in at the end of a quarter and get some wonderful insight around how the terminals are being placed, where are the hot spots, where are the cold spots, times of day that are warm and cold, and present those findings to the client. Those findings will in likelihood drive some actions by the client that will drive more revenue. We expect them potentially to buy those services from us in future. Which Asian markets are you targeting? With our existing Multi-Win Roulette product we already have over 350 of them deployed in Asia and it’s been proven to outperform competing products in venue trials. I think our success comes from delivering a higher yield, a higher hold than our competitors. That’s for twomain reasons. Firstly, we deliver the messages through the system much more swiftly and enable the player to place bets much more swiftly. Secondly, the player can choose his wheel, so he can move much more swiftly between the wheels. The player can see at any point in time where four wheels are in that cycle. Subject to the legislative requirements of the jurisdiction, there can be a wheel with a random number generator, an automatic wheel or live wheels. When will the Sabre cabinet be available? Production of the new Sabre cabinet starts in the third week in July. The first two installations—based on pre-production units—go out in July with two UK customers. And what about the baccarat product on the Sabre? With Live E-Baccarat we’ve kept the familiarity of the chip layout. There’s lots of consistency between the two pieces of content. The player can move between the contents and recognise how to select a chip and place this chip. But the unique part of this piece of content in this presentation is we’ve got actually four variants of baccarat. The first is standard commission baccarat with 5% commission to the house on winning bets. The second is a non- commission format, using Super 6. The third is commission based but with a pair of side bets. The fourth is non-commission baccarat with a banker’s bet. We’ve actually learnt a lot frombeing at the show in terms of exactly what flavours of baccarat we will offer on the final product. But what has gone down extremely well is that this is completely configurable and the player or the operator can run effectively all four games in one shoe. We can connect one live shoe and the player can select which flavour of baccarat they’re familiar with and they’d like to play. Or we can connect the server to four shoes and again play four separate shoes with four separate game cycles. Do you have a Chinese language interface for the baccarat? We do. At the moment, we’ve simplified Chinese and there’s no Mandarin voice. But there will be. The baccarat offer is unique in respect that nobody else has baccarat presented with the options of playing commission or non-commission on those bets. We’re talking to a number of IP owners in respect of which side bets and versions of baccarat we will ultimately offer and develop specifically for the Asian market. Something else to mention is the Real Touch technology on the 26-inch HD screen. If you place a chip for a bet, you actually get the sensation of touching the chip. It’s technology that’s available on the open market but its deployment is unique in the gaming sector. The reaction to Live E-Baccarat has been fantastic. It should be going through the GLI process very shortly. We’ll be customising the fine detail on the flavour of baccarat, on a card squeezing option, the language, the Mandarin voiceover, and certainly we’ll be back to the market within a few months. Options—the game choice screen on the Sabre’s touch screen Inspired Gaming