Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | April 2014 32 opened an office in Bologna, Italy, started to accept submissions for Colorado, and added former American Gaming Association president and CEO Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. to its board as nonexecutive director. GLI, which has certified more than 1,757,470 items and has consulted on and/or tested equipment for more than 455 jurisdictions, also remains active in transforming and tweaking its enterprise to conform to today’s increasingly complex gaming environment. The company continues to emphasize its commitment to customer service, hiring 250 people over the past two years, and dedicating 75 employees to do nothing but “go and visit clients,” according to Mr Maida. “Our development people physically go to the reservation or lottery or charitable gaming division or state gaming agency; not only in the U.S., but in Canada and around the world.” The goal of this endeavor, according to Mr Maida, is to not only cement relationships, but to get boots-on-the-ground feedback about local market and regulatory conditions that is disseminated to the entire GLI staff through the company’s global knowledge network. GLI then formulates strategies aimed at alleviating these issues. “We don’t phone it in,” Mr Maida said. “We want the relationship, and the only way to do that is to go to their office, meet face-to-face, and listen to what they want and need.” These one-on-one meetings also help GLI, in that they provide a glimpse into the technologies and issues that could impact gaming going forward, giving them a chance to proactively respond for both themselves and their customers. For example, five years ago, when GLI executives realized jurisdictions and regulators were once again warming toward online gaming, the company purchased Technical Systems Testing (TST), an internationally recognized testing facility offering a full range of testing and consulting services to the iGaming and land-based markets. “We were the first major, global lab in the online space and we did that by purchasing TST and bringing those people on board,” Mr Maida said. “We went from zero to a hundred instantly, instead of trying to build it all internally.” The insights garnered from these meetings also form the backbone of GLI’s annual Regulator’s Roundtables, a regulators- only meeting where gaming trends and issues are discussed. It has also led to the introduction of dozens of new GLI products and services designed to make day-to-day communication and business practices between the lab, regulators, operators and manufacturers easier and more efficient. These items include the Interops Center, which tests the ability of gaming devices to communicate with each other; GLIAccess, Point.Click.Submit. and Point.Click.Transfer., which Perhaps the biggest challenge facing all gaming labs going forward is the ongoing jurisdictional push toward online and mobile real- money wagering legalization. Both provide unique testing challenges. Tech Talk help expedite and track the product approval process; JIRA, a new service that alerts clients to bugs in their software in real time; and GLiCloud, a Cloud-based technology that empowers regulators to track the software and hardware that comprises the slot machines on the casino floor and relates the components to their regulatory approval status. eGaming Challenge Perhaps the biggest challenge facing all gaming labs going forward is the ongoing jurisdictional push toward online and mobile real-money wagering legalization. Both provide unique testing challenges. “Regulatory compliance testing of online gaming systems is quite different than testing traditional gaming devices, but the underlying regulatory matters are the same: ensuring fairness and integrity to the gaming public,” Mr Farley said. “So, testing paradigms in traditional gaming can easily be transferred to online gaming testing. “The impact that mobile gaming has had on compliance testing is in the form of software verification,” Mr Farley added. “Many of the mobile devices in use today do not have a means to have the software installed on the devices independently verified. Further, downloadable apps for mobile devices to engage in Internet gaming are difficult to track and verify.” Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. “Software associated with game outcome determination for mobile gaming is often housed on servers communicating with mobile devices, so verification of the mobile device software becomes more focused on the server software and the communication with the mobile device,”Mr Farley said.“Thus, validation of the mobile device software can be managed by the server, once the server software has been verified.” Mr Maida also thinks all or most of the testing issues involved with online and mobile gaming are solvable as well. Since many of the new Internet games are based on popular terrestrial slot games, Mr Maida believes previous testing done on the math, paytables and other aspects can be grandfathered forward to eGaming versions. However, for each eGaming solution, other issues and testing needs pop up, such as New Jersey’s desire to test the geolocation devices used by its online gaming providers. “Fortunately, we also have lots of bandwidth,”Mr Maida said. “We have network engineers and protocol engineers and that is all they work on. We are not a bunch of general practitioners. We have teams of specialists who drill down into what they have to know.” Reprinted with permission from Casino Journal.