Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming April 2015 41 with Matsui, where Matsui are actually our distributor in Korea because of the way the proposal process works where you must go in as part of a consortium of three or four different vendors together in order to bid, so we’re leveraging Matsui. That’s going extremely well now. Another key market we’re looking at is India, where you’ve got the possibility of the boats in Goa, we have a number of placements there. There’s also Daman, which is due to open with Deltin Group. They are due to get a license soon, so we’re in conversations as well with them around some placements. And really it’s all of the other key markets. Singapore is always going to be a key market for us with Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa, as well as Genting in Malaysia. We’ll go wherever the business is, and hopefully there’ll be new openings, like Japan. We don’t hear a lot about systems in Asia. You have the City of Dreams contract. Where else do you provide systems? How big is that for you in Asia? From an installation perspective, if you look at most of the major operators, especially the ones that are US-based and moved across to Asia, they’re already using our system because we’re there to leverage the global expansion. There are a couple of other sales opportunities that we’re currently working on. I can’t go into too much detail. But systems is a big focus for us. There’s a fair amount of functionality that we’re building into the product to make sure it meets all of the local regulatory requirements. Systems strategy for us differs by region. Here, the key focus for us is really trying to extend the Advantage product into those key markets. City of Dreams is taking them. There are also bolt-ons like the bonusing applications. Service Window is another key focus for us, where that’s going on trial at a number of operators. There are one or two going on in Macau in the short term, and in the Philippines City of Dreams opened with Service Window. And finally, we’re all now familiar with IGT’s commitment to producing market-attuned product. What are the other main elements of your game-development strategy? The approach that we’ve taken around why these games are so different to what we’ve talked about previously is this whole concept of VIP. So it’s really about, first thing is volatility. Where players are driven to play the ante bet, which is something that we haven’t really concentrated much on previous games. The other thing is innovation. If you’ve seen some of the bonus games, there’s Golden Dragon where the multiplier on the wheel is dependent on the stake itself, it’s not 1,000 credits, for example. So our approach to producing bonus features has really changed. The third one is presentation. So if you look at the graphics, the character set, and everything else that appears on the front end is as true to life as you can get at the moment, rather than choosing fake characters or something that doesn’t really portray what we’re trying to show. We’ve done a lot of extensive research to make sure all these character sets and graphics really articulate themselves to the culture. You’ll see with a lot of our new games, if you look at the real estate of the game itself, it’s really gone to the edges of the screen, whereas if you go to more of the classical, US-based games, there tends to be a lot of information out there, where you’ll see 3, 4 or 5 different reels, so it’s very different with the amount of space. Here it’s maximized as much as possible. The only fields you’ve got on there are your credit, your bet and your win. Because when you’re a high-volatility player, that’s all you’re concerned with: What am I betting, what am I going to win on this particular spin, and how much do I have left to play with? “The approach that we’ve taken around why these games are so different to what we’ve talked about previously is this whole concept of VIP. So it’s really about, first thing is volatility. Where players are driven to play the ante bet, which is something that we haven’t really concentrated much on previous games.” IGT Senior VP International Sales Sabby Gill Tech Talk