Inside Asian Gaming

June 2014 inside asian gaming 31 Feature that success in Macau may have obscured to some degree. Parent Aristocrat Leisure posted a 9.1% increase in after-tax profit for the first six months of this year, and it was largely driven by growth in new unit sales in the US, where its American subsidiary is taking bigger and bigger bites of the replacement market, together with new sales in its home market of Australia and sizable growth in revenues from its operating partnerships across an array of licensed games, which are invisible in Macau, banned by government regulation, but occupy a big space in the rest of the slots world. “Aristocrat made demonstrable progress in its product-led, share-taking strategy,” the company said at the time of the earnings release. “Across key markets, the Group closed portfolio gaps, better targeted game development and technology resources at key segments and improved front-end sales execution.” New openings in the months ahead in places like Southeast Asia and the Philippines should see this play out in significant opportunities for new unit sales while enabling the company to continue to present a fresh face to its core Macau constituency, as it did at G2E Asia with a wealth of new ideas for its Legends series, like 5 Dragons GOLD, which features a livelier graphical interface, a potent mix of multipliers up to 40 times in the base game, stacked wilds in reels 2, 3 and 4 that are activated as players bet up, and a top-box feature where max credits extend the middle reels up one to take the player from 243 ways to win to 576. The show also saw the launch of 5 Frogs, a 40-credit Reel Power game that expands At G2E Asia, Aristocrat presented a wealth of new ideas for its Legends series, like 5 Dragons GOLD, which features a livelier graphical interface, a potent mix of multipliers up to 40 times in the base game, stacked wilds in reels 2, 3 and 4 that are activated as players bet up, and a top-box feature where max credits extend the middle reels up one to take the player from 243 ways to win to 576. “There is an increasing amount of mass-market, average players that maybe have never walked into a casino before,” notes Mark Aubrey, director of Asia Pacific sales and development. “Aristocrat recognizes that we need to evolve.”