Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | August 2012 38 Aruze S teve Walther, Aruze Gaming America’s vice president of marketing, says his company’s electronic gaming machines seek to engage players on “new fun levels.”On the face of it, the eye-catching packages and interactive elements—such as the Bash Button on Lucky Sic Bo and Shoot to Win Craps, or the Reel Feel rod controller on Paradise Fishing—are what set Aruze’s products apart from those of its competitors, but the underlying math model of the games is equally important to their success, especially in Asian markets with a penchant for volatility. Inside Asian Gaming Publisher Kareem Jalal caught up with Mr Walther for a video interview, excerpts of which can be viewed online at the IAG Web site, www.asgam.com . The full transcript of the interview follows. Kareem Jalal : How is Asia going for you? SteveWalther : Asia is a fantastic market for Aruze. Over the last few months we’ve really started to come on strong with some of the new property openings—Sands Cotai Central, last year with Galaxy Macau. We’ve happened to move ourselves to some very good floor share with the performance of our product. So we’ve been very thrilled with how it’s going here in Macau and the expansion of gaming throughout the rest of Southeast Asia, as well as the Philippines. We’re very happy with how our product is performing, it’s resonating well with the market, and we’re happy to see it grow. You mentioned the Philippines, which is expected to be one of the big growth markets in coming years. Aruze in particular is well-positioned to benefit from that expansion. Yes. We have great products with very strong themes that resonate well with the people of the Philippines as well as other areas in Asia and around the world. We are starting to do very well in the United States—equally as well as we have done in Asia. We’re also doing well in Australia and South Africa. The bottom line in the Philippines is we’ve built product that we know will work with those types of gamblers in their environment and we’re really excited to see not only our product performing in the existing venues that are there, but as gaming expands with some of the integrated resorts that are opening up down there, then we can see our product getting even further out there. Behind the performance of your products is the tremendous amount of resources you’ve devoted to research and development. Can you tell us a bit about that effort? We have development centers in Tokyo, Japan, we have development centers in Manila, we have a development center in Sydney, Australia, as well as in North America. So we’ve built development teams around the world to capture the essences of players that are global in nature. So what we do is we spend a lot of time developing the products, looking at the market, listening to players, and we build our products with the players in mind. We’ve designed our products to engage players. We want players to feel the game. With our Paradise Fishing you saw that with the ‘Reel Feel’ rod controller. You saw that with our first Innovator Steppers with Radiant Reel technology. Even with some of the new games you can touch the machine to get a little bit of excitement. We’re truly engaging the players on new levels and new fun levels. As we build and design all around the world for games that are fun, players are Defining Fun Attention-grabbing packaging and interactivity are the immediately apparent distinguishing features of Aruze’s games. Just as important to the games’ sustained success in Asia, however, are strong math models Standing out on the floor—Aruze’s Lucky BigWheel SteveWalther