Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | May 2012 26 Aristocrat M acau’s prodigious growth as a slots market the last seven or eight years speaks volumes to just how good manufacturers have gotten at localizing themes, content and playability. No one has done this better than Aristocrat. To say the New South Wales- based slot giant dominates the city’s floors here is an understatement. At the end of last year, the company estimated its share at 55% to 65% of Macau’s installed base at the time of 16,000 or so machines—a market that generated in US dollar terms more than $1.43 billion in 2011 and is likely to hit $2 billion this year. In some casinos, Aristocrat’s share runs as high as 70%. Ask anyone here whose business is slots, and to a person they’ll rattle off six games that essentially define the experience for the majority of Macau’s machine players—5 Dragons™, Choy Sun Doa™, 50 Dragons™, FA FA FA™, 5 Koi™, Fortune King™—and they’re all Aristocrat’s. “We had a good base and an understanding of Asia, being Australian,” says David Punter, general manager Asia Pacific for Aristocrat Leisure Limited, recalling how the company first planted its flag in the market in a big way with the opening of Sands Macao back in 2004. “We consider Australia a part of Asia. We’ve got a large contingent of Asian players in Australia. And our games designers represent a combination of Australian-based Chinese, so they understand some of the concepts.” What Aristocrat grasped early on was that Sands Macao was bringing to the market its first experience with a Western, resort-scale gambling model, with all that implied, including the potential for a mass market that could evolve into a sizable slots market. “We localized pretty quickly,” Mr Punter remembers. “We came up and we saw certain games we had that weren’t Chinese, so we made sure we had Chinese there. Some of our other competitors came in with more US-based product, and we took a more Australian, a more tailored, approach.” The result was first-mover advantage. Aristocrat hasn’t looked back since. 5 Dragons, a member of the company’s stalwart Reel Power™ series (as is Choy Sun Doa), was introduced in Macau the year the Sands opened. It is still the most popular standalone in the city. What’s innovative about Reel Power is that it allows players to buy reels rather than lines, openingupscatter pays for all winning combinations, any win with a symbol on an adjacent reel, with up to 243“ways”to win with 25 credits played. It’s a technology for the serious player. Part of the beauty 5 Dragons brings to it is an“ante”bet, which pays five additional free games in the bonus, the effect of which is to jack RTP to better than 95%. Casino patrons were quick to catch on. They love, too, the fact that in the bonus they can choose their volatility— more spins at lower multipliers or fewer spins at higher multipliers—with a 30-times multiplier that might pay more than 24,000 credits on a single spin. If they re-trigger the bonus feature during the free games, that lets them choose the number of free games and multipliers again after the initial bonus round is complete, which means they can change their volatility in subsequent rounds. Three “Gold Coins” on reels 1, 2 and 3 trigger the free-games bonus. Four or five coins from left to right trigger the bonus starting with a bigger win. Five coins pay 50 times total bet. A “Red Packet” on reel 1 and reel 5 pays a bonus ranging from two to 50 times the bet. Aristocrat enhanced its edge by layering winning base games like this under its popular Hyperlink™progressive.The strategy was launched in Macau with Cash Express™, “The Train Game,” as it came to be known among the Chinese, which proved that Macau’s fledgling slot players were more than willing to be seduced by the idea of the The Games People Play Aristocrat dominates Asia’s slot floors by knowing what works and how to make it better Dragon Superior—an Xtreme Mystery game combining a standalone under a mystery link—will be unveiled at G2E Asia