Inside Asian Gaming

June 2012 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 21 INSIGHTS development team responsive and sharp is through managing product management well. We have a product management division whose entire purpose in life is to decide the future versions of the products and the future directions of the products. So product development executes the ideas that product management comes up with. And product management stays in touch with technology trends in the industry, talks to customers, attends seminars, attends customer advisory panels, listens to customers, and prioritizes that list andmakes sure it represents all the markets all over the world, to make sure that what the Macau customers want, what the Asian customers want, is there. Product management make up the list, and product development executes on that. So that’s howwe keep product development controlled and sharp. And would you say your development teams are perhaps bigger or more highly skilled than those of your competitors? I would guess so. I want to be humble about who we are. I’m sure our competitors also do great work. But in terms of the scalability, in terms of the amount of R &D we do, in systems alone we have about an 800 plus R&D team. That is by far the largest R&D team ever built in gaming systems in the history of gaming. No company has ever taken systems as seriously as we have taken it over the last few years. So an 850 person R&D team that is disciplined and focused and an extraordinarily talented team is pushing the products forward at a very rapid pace. Among the innovations you’ve got on display here is the industry’s first curved LCD, which offers a realistic reel- like experience. What is the thinking behind that product? We’ve talked about your software development. Can you tell us a bit about the hardware development process? Actually the hardware development and the hardware innovation and all the new cabinets we’ve had has led the innovation for us. With respect to games, the innovation in hardware cabinets came first. Over the last few years, we innovated and came out with a whole array of brilliant cabinets. In terms of hardware cabinets, we’ve done a phenomenal job over the last few years in terms of making our games more attractive. Now that we went through that phase, we’re now focused on more software innovation to make sure we provide enough content on those hardware cabinets. So all the new hardware cabinets we came up with in the last few years, each of them has been successful. Our V32. Our Pro Curve is one example of that. We are the very first ones to come out with the curved LCD. In fact, I think we’re the only ones now. Historically, Bally was a great stepper company. Over the last few years we’ve made the transition to being a great video company. And Curve [the Pro Curve cabinet] is a good bridge there. It’s a stepper product, it’s a video product, you don’t know which one it is. And that’s a very good bridge between the old stepper products. It attracts patrons who like steppers, but the video gives us a lot more functionality, you can do a lot more with it, and Curve is just a brilliant bridge between the two. One of the things in highlight at this show for you is the iDeck, which has evolved and now it’s allowing a lot more player interactivity. So there’s fun arcade style games you can play on them now. What was the rationale for developing these interactive functions? Was it to bring a new breed of player to games, or was it to engage the existing players more? I would say the main purpose is to engage the existing players more. And if you engage the existing players more, and you make it more fun and entertaining for them, that will get the new players as well. But we’ve first got to make it more interesting, make it more entertaining, and provide more options for the current players. And when you have something like the iDeck, the options are infinite. We can make them play games, shoot targets, a skee ball kind of game, play the piano in All That Jazz. There’s a lot of things we can come up with. If you look at Bally’s success over the past few years, and if you ask me one reason for that, it is the innovation. It is the rapid rate at which we’ve innovated. We’ve come out with new ideas, whether it is iVIEW DM on systems, or iDeck on games, we’ve constantly come upwith new, effective ideas that customers want, that makes it more fun for patrons, and if we continue doing that we will also attract new players much faster than the others. One of the great components of your systems is the Elite Bonusing Suite. How’s that going in Asia? Is there more take-up in Asia of that? It is picking up quite well in Asia. Initially, when we started with systems in Asia five, six years ago, the focus was more on the basics because the Macau customers did not have access to those kinds of systems products. They needed to run their table Lineup of Pro Curve cabinets