Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming December 2014 20 Insights picture first, if you look at the time that I’ve been in the market, nearly 10 years now, when we first came to market we all brought Australian product, we all brought product that didn’t even have Chinese language on it, we didn’t have Chinese themes. If you look at what’s out there today, it’s really gone heavily into Asianizing, or China-sizing, the product. Duo Fu Duo Cai is a classic example, very, very Chinese-themed, heavily developed graphically towards that player, and with also the maths packages to suit the market. When we built Duo Fu Duo Cai we actually built it for the Macau market. And it’s quite a step away from what have been the traditional maths packages that most companies bring here. It’s a very complex piece of maths. It shows a lot of volatility, and it works well. We’ve been rolling it out into other markets in Asia, and it’s been successful there. We’re now rolling it out around the world, because if you look around the world there are a lot of Chinese players. Reports are it’s doing great in the US. That’s our main sales. We are getting the results on it. It’s interesting. Do you see a similar influence coming from the US in the opposite direction? As the player base here matures, is there an opportunity to introduce Macau to entertainment-style games geared more to time on device? Not for a number of years. I think the market’s got to mature a lot more. When you look at what the draw of the market is, it’s mainland Chinese players, some 80-something percent, and if you look at that, they’re bringing 30 million visitors a year to the market, and that’s growing, but still we’re only tapping a very small part of the Chinese market. There are a lot of people, particularly as you head further into China, who have never been to Macau. So I don’t think the market is ready for time-on-device, entertainment-style games yet. They’re still looking for that “I want to come here, I’m here for a short time, I want to have a big win.” And I think volatility does that, and that’s what’s proving to be successful. To go to the maths models that we need for some of the other markets, where it is more mature, it’s too early for Macau. I think Macau is still very much an emerging market. Standalone progressives have been introduced at various times, Bally’s Fu Dao Le being a recent example: Does the same thing apply? Standalone progressives really don’t work because you can’t get a big enough jackpot on a standalone progressive. They really haven’t been successful in Macau. Maybe outside Macau they work much better. Hence, why most of the product that we bring from Bally-SG going forward is going to be linked product. It’s links where you can get a group of machines contributing to a large enough jackpot to make them attractive. And that’s the volatility factor coming into play as well. What about licensed games, another strong suit for Bally. The Michael Jackson series, for example, has played well in this part of the world. Everyone’s wondering what the right license theme is for the Chinese market. Certainly we’ve all tried a few, the Michael Jacksons, we’ve got Titanic at Bally now, we’re waiting to see how that adopts. We’ve done The Flintstones in the SHFL range. But typically, across the market, the licensed themes haven’t worked so well. I guess it’s how do you get something that is really, really Chinese, that is a licensed theme, and what is that? If you’ve got any ideas let me know. But in Asia it’s a little different outside Macau, right? Isn’t there more of a market for a Western-style slot experience? It’s interesting. While a good game is always a good game everywhere, when you look across the product portfolio that we have, what you find, particularly in markets like Singapore, even though it’s a fairly new market, the club markets have been there, and the players have traveled to Genting [Highlands], they’ve traveled to other gaming facilities in the regional area, or they’ve played in the Singapore clubs. It’s much more mature than what I think the Macau market is. The Macau market, because of its big numbers, we just haven’t had the volume of people through here yet. But they’re coming. For SHFL, of course, the opportunities must be sizable as well, in Macau and regionally. With SHFL utilities we’re very happy at the moment. Tables are growing. As a company obviously we’re developing new products for the portfolio. We just recently, or about a year ago, released our Chip Star machine, which is the new chipper. That’s getting “Virtual continues to grow in revenue, and one particular venue made us aware recently how much it had grown. So we believe it’s time now to bring the good new virtual products back into the market and to push them, and that’s one of the focuses we’ll be looking at in the next 12 months.”

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTIyNjk=