Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming November 2014 14 Look just about anywhere in East and Southeast Asia and you’ll find a Weike slot machine. They’re in Singapore, Malaysia, Macau, in South Korea and the Philippines, in Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar, even in Nepal and Sri Lanka. It takes solid products to achieve this. It’s the factor that is “central to our growth,” says Ray Poh, chief operating officer of Singapore-based Weike Gaming Technology. “The other key to it is innovation,” he says. “We don’t want to just build standard games. The market actually sits up and takes notice when you innovate and put a little spin on different concepts.” Markets have been noticing Weike since the late ’90s, when the company began expanding from club operations, principally in Malaysia, into game development, largely because the big international manufacturers couldn’t be bothered to customize games for its players But it was the debut of Singapore’s IRs that was the real catalyst. “That’s when we started looking at GLI certification and getting our platform up to speed,” Mr Poh recalls. “During this time we expanded into electronic table games and also systems as well to back up the entire operation.” The company also got serious about building its talent base, notably with the addition of Andrew Masen, among others. A one-time game design manager for Australia’s Stargames, Mr Masen joined in 2008, and as vice president of Game Design and Development has nurtured the growth of an R&D team that now numbers more than 50. Weike has been rolling out an increasingly rich palette of games around solid maths and world-class graphics ever since. Today, the company enjoys around a 20% share of Singapore’s vibrant club market and has another 100 or so installations inMarina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa—a creditable performance when you consider that both slot floors are capped by law at 2,500 EGM positions each. The word spread quickly to Macau and the Philippines, where the high-volatility 50-line standalones that were making the company’s name in Singapore quickly found a niche, led by Qin Shi Huang, which packs a compelling gamble in the form of a multiplier that progressively increases during the feature and has been a stalwart performer in Macau and is still the most popular game for Weike in the Philippines five years after its release. More Chinese-centric themes followed on Qin Shi Huang’s successful math—Justice Bao, Wu Ze Tian, the slightly less volatile Duo Di Zhu Gold, based on the classic Chinese card game “Beat the Landlord” and featuring a unique 10-reel window configuration, and the high-volatility Cao Cao on the company’s innovative UltiWays series, where the third reel is divided into three windows for 768 ways to win. There is also an exciting new multi-level progressive link undergoing certification that could hit the Macau and Philippine markets before the end of the year. Victory, as it’s called, is designed around the central imagery of the horse, an animal revered in Chinese lore for its associations with success and achievement. The four jackpot levels are represented by different-colored steeds, each of which figures prominently in the narrative of “pursuit” that is integral to the psychology of the big win, and this is carried through in the volatile free games multipliers and stack symbol maths built into its introductory 50-line base games, Fortune Meow and Legendary Archer. The Infinity line of electronic multi-player baccarat and roulette games promises to be another potent weapon. Known for its innovative “squeeze-the-cards” technology, Infinity Baccarat has been a strong performer for the company in Laos and in the clubs in Vietnam, where Weike controls around 60% of the e-table market. In the meantime, the company continues to grow its systems business. WeSystems has expanded into more than 100 properties across Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia by specializing in a highly modular and affordable technology targeting the club and small-casino market. In Macau it currently connects around 600 EGMs in four casinos. “We actually have a pretty big presence,” Mr Poh says of WeSystems. “That’s one thing that a lot of people overlook. It’s something different about us as well.” Cover Story On to Victory WEIKE GAMING TECHNOLOGY Primed to take on Macau’s casino floors—the new Victory linked progressive.