Inside Asian Gaming

September 2011 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 65 technology and content. I’d also say we kind of sit back and have a look at some of our products—not all the products from the US and Australia should drop straight in the market. That’s been proven to be a failure in many cases as well. We take a bit of a step back, have a look at what we think might work, work with our R&D and games designers and pick the best out of a portfolio of product to take to market. Maybe [we’re] a little bit slow in technology, but we’re fast catching up in that space to make sure that we’ve got the right strategy there. Although you’re constantly rolling out new games, two of your titles, 5 Dragons and 50 Dragons, are still your staple products. Their longevity and popularity is nothing short of remarkable. But do you also see that as a bit of a curse? It’s a very interesting question. I’d rather be the company that has them than the company that doesn’t have them. That’s probably not tongue-in-cheek; that’s an answer. I’d rather have those games and build on that brand loyalty. Now, those titles are still popular for every new casino opening, new property expansion that’s happening. We’ve taken a lot of those successful titles through Xcite [Aristocrat’s previous game platform], into 19 inch, and into our WideScreen products. That just gives us a good solid base to build off. What we are looking at is doing some brand extensions into those product categories which you can see with 5 Dragons Legends and doing some other titles like possibly doing 50 Dragons Legends and some expansions of that. So, as long as it’s performing and you can leverage off that and the players adopt those games and like those games, then it’s a win-win for both Aristocrat and the operator and also the player. Sure, we are trying to make games very different to that and test that and see if there is player acceptance there. That’s one of the key opportunities that I want to drive going forward in the business. We’ve got some new styles of games like Remix™ and Imperial House, where you can drag and drop. Some of those concepts may be the next 5 Dragons or may be the next 50 Lions. We are not being complacent, we’ve just got to try some new concepts out in that space. Hopefully, the players gravitate to that and then we can run with a new suite of games after that. You recently developed a custom slot game for Wynn Macau: the Tree of Prosperity. What’s the background to that? From both Wynn’s and our perspective, Wynn approached us about doing a game specifically for them and it was a bit of a new initiative from Aristocrat’s perspective. We haven’t done a game like that that I can recollect in our history. So, without going into too many details, [it was] a very good collaboration between Wynn and our game studios, our marketing and our sales guys to see if we could develop a product that related to Wynn’s ‘Tree of Prosperity’ [an animated sculpture] in one of their main foyers. We took some of those assets and put them on a good solid maths package and got it [the product] to market. We probably did that in around nine to 12 months. From our side of things it’s been very positive and I believe the performance for Wynn has been very strong as well and they are happy with the product. And can you tell us a bit about your online strategy? In general the company is looking at the online space. We’ve got some great assets which we believe can transfer into different platforms, online being one. Lottery is another one and the server based space as well. We’re at an early stage of introducing games to the online environment. Obviously, there are regulations around the way you can and can’t do that—restrictions. But what we have found with some things like we’ve released some apps on the Apple iStore—there is Geisha, Sun and Moon, 5 Dragons, Imperial House, and a few more games coming—is a lot of the people who are playing those games are actually from the Asian regions. The majority are from the US, but when you combine a lot of the Asian countries together, almost most of them are being played by players in the Asian region. The adoption of that technology and Apple’s technology and iPads and those types of product providers means it’s a space we cannot not look at because I think our assets are very strong, they’re ours with IP around them, and we can leverage those into many other platforms, whether it’s online or server based or lotteries or apps. Do you think the dominance of VIP baccarat in Macau is hindering the growth of slots? I think VIP baccarat and baccarat is always going to be a major player in Macau and certain Asian regions. But I suppose what we’ve noticed is there is a VIP slot player that exists as well, nowhere near the extent of the VIP baccarat player, but that high-end player which, since we’ve got a majority of the machines in the VIP room, is very positive for us. There is a little bit of correlation between players coming across from tables to slots. Where we can pinpoint that, I’m not sure. But as the Macau region grows, the revenues of the slots are growing. We’ve been in the marketplace now for six or seven years. There is a real slot player out there who is coming over and playing slots rather than playing tables. That’s a focus for us to make sure that we provide the right products for that emerging slot player and new games and new game banks and interesting combinations of games. I don’t think it’s going to hurt the baccarat sector too much, but maybe there is some relationship between our games and baccarat that we could incorporate in the future.