Extra features, comfortable ergonomics and a sleek design are as important as the content for a gaming machine to be successful. The rest is about fine tuning the offering and finding the right customer mix, said participants at a Thursday panel session at the Global Gaming Expo (G2E) Asia @ the Philippines 2025, a casino industry trade show in Manila.
Michael Grimes, a principal at GGRAsia – a leading online platform dedicated to business-to-business news about the Asia-Pacific gaming sector – led the discussion on “Opportunities for Casinos in Asia to Lead in Slots and ETG Technology”.
The success of gaming machines – including electronic table games (ETGs) in a casino floor “still very much tracks the hardware, the sounds, the illustrations and lighting,” noted Vincent Tang, vice president of sales for Asia Pacific at Interblock Asia Pacific Pty Ltd.
“You can have good maths and a strong game, but if it’s in a boring cabinet, it will not perform. But you might have an average game in the really outstanding cabinet, and it just flies,” he added.
Eddie Au, chief operating officer at Macau-based gaming supplier LT Game Ltd, said during the discussion that design remains key in innovation and launching new products.
“You can see that the cabinets are getting bigger, the screens are getting larger, you’re getting more LEDs, and so on. The content and games are still the core of any product, but there’s always room to improve” in terms of cabinet design and features, he stated.
Shirley Tam, executive vice president for casino marketing at Tiger Resort Leisure & Entertainment Inc, operator for the Okada Manila casino resort in the Philippine capital, said operators usually look for “new and innovative ideas and products” that suppliers have to offer.
“We look for some of the bells and whistles that were just mentioned,” said Ms Tam.
“If there is some compelling new product, we’re willing to work with the vendor and test new products on our gaming floor, do proper analysis, optimisations and see whether they’re more VIP-driven or mass-market -driven type,” she added.
Crossover and customer mix
According to Ms Tam, slot players “like the animations, free games and bonus plays”. “So, anything that is able to attract them to have that frequency of the bonus plays, we’ll keep them at the machine and extend their play,” she explained.
In terms of ETGs, it has more to do with the kind of side bets, bonus plays and jackpots available to the players,” she stated, adding that there were also nuances depending on a customer nationality.
“For example, we do find differences in terms of the Japanese market versus [the] Korean market,” Ms Tam said. While Korean consumers have a “tendency to play different kinds of machines, and are more likely to play server-based games, Japanese players tend to like more standalone games,” she added.
According to the panel, there is opportunity for some crossover in terms of customer usage of product segments: slots, ETGs and live tables.
While Interblock’s Mr Tang sees more crossover between slot players and ETG players, Okada Manila’s Ms Tam says there is a “very small segment that does cross over” from live tables to slots.
“You do have to find the right product and put it in the right area in order to drive that cross-product plan,” Ms Tam stressed.
She added: “For us at Okada, we like to have a good mix of everything because we do cater to a wide range of customers from different countries.”
Mr Tang noted that ETGs have been “getting very popular in the past decade” because they allow venue operators to “reduce a lot of manpower, errors and costs”.
Not only does game play become more efficient and faster, he added, but each title can eventually be installed or disabled “according to each region’s regulatory approvals. “So, all these help increase revenue, performance, and occupancy,” he stated.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is gaming products is also becoming more common, but in LT Game’s case, not so much for the game mechanics, said Mr Au.
“We use it more for the back end [of gaming products], like for reporting and analysis purposes, so that we can more correctly analyse players’ behaviours, adjust bet limits, and have a better understanding of our customers,” he explained.
From the operator side, highlighted Ms Tam, “the more data we get, the more beneficial it is in terms of doing marketing analysis and optimisation of the [casino] floor”.
