Enter the dragon: Aristocrat readies for CNY worldwide

Jun 13, 2023 Newsdesk G2E Asia 2023: Singapore, Latest News, Top of the deck  

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Two years ago, when Covid-19 was still affecting entertainment industries around the world, slot machine maker Aristocrat Leisure Ltd was trying to think ahead about how best to maximise the marketing impact of its enduring dragon themes in its games. So said Lloyd Robson, Aristocrat’s general manager for Asia, in an interview with GGRAsia.

He is pictured with the firm’s “Dragon Link” product, showcased at the recent Global Gaming Expo (G2E) Asia 2023 Special Edition: Singapore.

Part of the company’s answer was to take advantage of a once-every-12-years event: the arrival of the Year of the Dragon, due next Chinese New Year (CNY), from February 10, 2024. The festival has now transcended its home culture, to include not only consumers in the Chinese diaspora, but to capture the imaginations of consumers around the world, says the company.

“Our goal always is to present great games… but what we’ve also done is position them in a way that we can partner with casinos to maximise the Year of the Dragon,” he told GGRAsia.

The plan also dovetailed with the normalisation of travel in and out of mainland China, Macau and Hong Kong, in early January this year.

Aristocrat was focused on “making sure we have the right products at the right time,” and in the right places, stated the executive.

“We made those decisions two years ago, to position ourselves for these moments. We are certainly starting to get a lot of interest from operators right across the region, including Macau.”

Aristocrat is taking its games and “leveraging them for a Chinese New Year 2024 period under the ‘Home of the Dragons’ banner,” he observed.

“That is a form of innovation as far as we’re concerned, around positioning ourselves as more than just a transaction,” aimed at operators, said the executive.

This partnership with operators encompassed “product activation on the floor,” Mr Robson noted. It’s about “how we position the games on the casino floor with a marketing package or with a signage package,” he added.

“Second… is how you create the marketing programmes to attract the players to go and engage in that activation on the floor.”

This might involve liaison on approaches to jackpots and bonusing. “That’s going to be different depending on each operator… Some will already have some pretty comprehensive marketing programmes,” said Mr Robson.

Philippines, Macau tech standards

Mr Robson says an example of Aristocrat’s effort in supporting its products within a market, is the recent opening of a showroom in Manila, the Philippine capital.

Gross gaming revenue (GGR) in the Philippines has been leaping since the normalisation of leisure activity post pandemic – via domestic demand as well as tourists from overseas, and across different categories of casino gambling.

The Philippine casino sector produced GGR of PHP59.26 billion (US$1.06 billion) in the three months to March 31, up by 80.9 percent from the prior-year period, showed official data.

“Our goal will always be to remain one step ahead” of competitors, in terms of market support, stated the Aristocrat executive.

“We’ve tripled our workforce in the last 18 months in the Philippines… from three to 12” people, he added. “That will be further expanded on by the end of this year. They’re right across multiple departments.”

The Philippines represents “the largest EGM [electronic gaming machine] market in Asia, give or take 25,000 machines – for context, remember Macau is 12,000,” observed the executive.

GGRAsia also asked Mr Robson about the deadline fully to implement Macau’s EGM Technical Standards version 2.0 in the city’s market having been extended to the end of 2026.

He stated: “Obviously all 12,000 machines in [the] Macau [market] need to become compliant within a four-year period, and that’s a minimum of 3,000 changes a year.”

“We put a ton [of effort] into development – specific to this programme – for our existing [product] catalogue,” he said. Such 2.0-compliant product “is already on the floor as well as our new games. Naturally, all of our new games are 2.0 compliant.”

“We worked with the customers in advance of doing our game rework development, to understand what games they needed on the floor, such that in a 2.0 world, they would have [access to] what they had before,” Mr Robson added.

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