GGRAsia – Konami takes aim at Macau after APAC success

Konami takes aim at Macau after APAC success

Jul 25, 2024 Newsdesk Latest News, Trends & Tech

The Konami brand is looking to extend its recent slot-product success in Asia Pacific (APAC) locations including the Philippines, with a push into the highly-competitive Macau market, said regional representative David Punter (pictured), in an interview with GGRAsia.

“We’ve got more traction outside of Macau at the moment. But Macau’s going be a bigger focus for us,” he stated.

Mr Punter is operations manager sales, marketing and service for Australia and APAC, for Konami Australia Pty Ltd.

He noted: “We’re fully committed to this region.”

The manager stated: “We’re really successful in the Philippines. We’ve done extra orders into the two Singapore properties,” Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa. In Malaysia, at Resorts World Genting, “our machines are number two,” he added.

In Asia Pacific “we’ve got “Bull Rush,” “Fortune Mint,” “Wild Envelope,” stated the sales boss, reeling off names of some of the company’s current top slot products.

For Macau, “we’ve just been getting some products approved from the DICJ,” he stated, referring to Macau’s casino regulator, the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau.

‘We’ve landed a few products into some of the properties up here,” including at City of Dreams in Cotai.

“I expect the next 12 months we’ll see continued growth of Konami’s presence on the [Macau] floor,” said Mr Punter

He noted: “We’ve been able to get Fortune Mint on the floor, which is a great product we showed last year” at G2E Asia.

Bull Blitz approval in Macau

“We had ‘All Aboard’ previously and we’re just been through the approval process for ‘Bull Blitz’, [also pictured] which is the next generation of All Aboard,” explained Mr Punter.

“Beyond that is a really interesting product called ‘Prize Strike’. It has ‘Golden Tree’ unique game features,” he added. “We’ve still got to tailor our product a little bit to the market. We just can’t take stuff out of the U.S. and Australia.”

Mr Punter observed: “You’ve got to get your bet line structure right; your artwork right; and your maths behind the game has to be right.”

He added: “We’re focused on that, and we want to do better at that. And we’ve got great success around the region on different types of games.”

This included via hold and spin games, “and some less volatile games as well, like Fortune Mint and Wild Envelope”.

Mr Punter noted: “They’ve been very successful for us. They’re not hold and spin, they’re not repeat win. They’ve got just different game features where you accumulate prizes and so forth. It’s good to have core products and innovative different products. It’s not just [about] staying in the one channel,” product wise.

Asked what had contributed to recent success in the Philippines, as an example, the manager stated: “We’ve made sure we got the jackpot levels right. There’s a bit of a linked jackpot market there now; it’s not just a standalone [slot product] market.”

Konami also offers “variations on hold and spin… we do repeat win. We do it a little bit differently to some of the other gaming manufacturers,” said the sales manager.

The Philippines was also a repeat-visit market, due to elements including play by locals within their own community, and from domestic tourism.

Mr Punter stated: “It’s not just people flying in and flying out. So once they [casino players] become familiar with the game and they like that game, then they’ll come back to that game.”

For Asia Pacific as a whole, said the manager, “I’m excited about making sure in that next six to 12 months we improve that maybe 5 percent of things that make the games better in the region”.