GGRAsia – Details key for casino tech wins in Asia: Ken Jolly L&W

Details key for casino tech wins in Asia: Ken Jolly L&W

Jul 05, 2024 Newsdesk Industry Talk, Latest News, Top of the deck

Attention to every detail is the key to success in the highly-competitive casino slot machine sector across multiple markets, says Ken Jolly (pictured), vice president and managing director for Asia at casino equipment supplier Light & Wonder Inc (L&W).

He also told GGRAsia that as live-dealer tables on casino floors start to become as data-rich and data-driven as casino slots due to the introduction of ‘smart tables’, there was potential for crossover of customers and even synergies between traditional tables and electronic game terminals.

Light & Wonder is a specialist in electronic table games (ETGs) as well as slot machines.

He stated: “A lot of people make slot machines, but to make a really good one that gives the best profit, is the hardest thing.”

In the iGaming sector, “there are probably 500-plus games a year made, [and] there’s probably five good ones”.

“People think it should be that easy” to make a good game by combining “cabinets and graphics and away you go,” observed Mr Jolly. “That’s not right. We’ve moved our needle [gained] in terms of ship share position in the last probably 12 months.”

That’s because “our games are working,” he added. “It’s our graphic designers, because what attracts a player to a machine is whether it looks good.”

Beyond the look, “it’s also our mathematicians who make the best games,” added Mr Jolly.

While many industry insiders already discount the notion there is such thing as a universal “Asian market”, even they might not fully understand how much work must be put in by a manufacturer to find success at jurisdictional level, noted the executive.

He explained: “We as a company build software for the Philippines and non-regulated markets. We build software for [South] Korea because the won [currency] has got so many zeros in it that’s difficult to deal with that” on a gaming machine.

He added: “We build software for Singapore because they require harm minimisation elements in the software.”

Mr Jolly said, referring to Macau’s gaming regulator the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, also known as DICJ: “We build for Macau, because there are certain metering requirements by the DICJ that are different to other markets. So technically in Asia we have four different software bases.”

ETG-live table crossover

According to the Light & Wonder representative, the markets “are all very positive in Asia,” after “finally coming out of [the] Covid” pandemic. Macau is “phenomenal,” demand-wise, amid specification update requirements under the city’s Electronic Gaming Machine Technical Standards 2.0.

“We still have a lot of Equinox [cabinets] that still have ‘Duo Fu Duo Cai’ games in them…. We will be [working] to replace those” by 2026, said Mr Jolly.

The Dualos and the DualosX cabinets “can be upgraded”, stated the executive.

“One of the reasons” the firm’s Equinox cabinets and some Bally legacy – i.e., pre-merger – cabinets “cannot”, is that they “don’t have the horsepower” for the new-style random number generator technology, he explained.

The Light & Wonder executive added that in terms of game product, “we are moving on now to newer games coming out across the world, due to trends and changes”.

The casino market’s move into smart tables for traditional live-dealer games has potential benefits and synergies for makers of casino slot machines and makers of ETGs, including Light & Wonder, Mr Jolly told GGRAsia.

“The smart table does change things,” he stated. For the industry, it creates an operating and data environment “that is more like” that of a “slot machine”.

He added: “You can now collect all the data from the table, which will allow operators to operate the tables better. It’ll allow them to understand dealer speed, type of dealers, accuracy of dealers, all those sorts of things.”

The price points of minimum bets on ETGs have typically been much lower than those for live tables. But Mr Jolly suggested it might be feasible – via data integration between live smart tables and ETGs – to use things such as game-result perceived ‘patterns’ in baccarat games to drive interest and play on the ETGs.

Perceived game result ‘patterns’ – particularly for baccarat – and betting based on such perceived patterns are a popular activity among gamblers in Asia.

“You might be playing your ETG and taking a [results] feed from a live table, and saying ‘I want [to bet on] that [live table] play trend’,” he explained.

Depending on requirements of individual jurisdictions and regulators, “there’s no reason why you can’t stream” live-table action “onto an ETG, there’s no reason why you can’t have play trends coming either from the ETGs or from the live tables across the floor, and the players select a particular trend they like; and say the top 10 [game result] trends can be shown anywhere in the casino,” said Mr Jolly.