Inside Asian Gaming

April 2014 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 7 COVER STORY B accarat in Asia is all about the process. In a drawn-out ritual known as “squeezing,” Chinese players slowly and deliberately peel back their cards to reveal the outcomes. It’s a titillating striptease that elicits oohs and aahs from players and onlookers. Although casino operators would prefer to dispense with card squeezing at their tables in order to run more hands per hour, that would destroy the spirit of the game for many of their customers. After all, going by the cold, hard stats of the outcomes alone, a bet on “Banker” or “Player” is pretty much equivalent to calling the toss of a coin. By contrast, on the majority of Asia’s electronic gaming machines the process could arguably be done away with. If Macau’s gaming regulators had not decreed the deactivation of the auto-play function on the city’s slots, the biggest players would probably continue sticking guitar picks into the spin buttons while they either dozed off or went and played a table game, only returning after their credits ran out or a bonus feature was triggered. Hisao Oguchi, president of SEGA SAMMY CREATION INC., is on a mission to get those players excited about the process again. Mr Oguchi, a legendary video and arcade game developer now intent on creating revolutionary gaming machines, has been visiting casinos across the region and checking out what’s currently on offer. He concludes that “Although the games had variety in the past, now they all tend to be more or less the same.” He understands the rationale for homogeneous products—they make development and production more efficient for manufacturers— but the result is “Players are no longer interested in the process because on any game they play it’s almost the same. So they would rather just press the button and have an outcome.” Mr Oguchi observes: “Right now a lot of the people gambling in Macau have dreams of winning enough money to buy a home, raise their children, and so on, but I believe a casino floor should be a place where people don’t just win or lose but enjoy the process. “It would be better if you spent $1,000 and got $2,000 worth of entertainment, not spent $1,000 trying to win $1 million but probably lost it all.” “Put simply, a gaming machine is just a method of determining who wins and who loses. On each of our games we focus most of our time and effort in making the determination process as entertaining as possible.”