Innovation and a flexible approach to players and operators give WMS an edge in Asia and beyond
“Enjoy your slot game!” booms out a voice on WMS’s Powerball Power Seat™ slot product.
The voice has a point. Industry insiders can talk about product differentiation, steppers, reels and game packs until they’re blue in the face, but the ultimate test of success is whether players enjoy the game and spend money on it. In that context, WMS believes it has a significant edge over its rivals.
If the company has a motto written on the walls of its research and development facilities around the world, it must say something like: ‘Details count’.
If you can pick out the sound of a WMS slot machine even on a crowded casino floor, there’s a reason. The manufacturer says it has a dedicated team of six flesh and blood musicians based at its Chicago headquarters just to produce the music and sounds for WMS slot products.
Distinctive
“The strength of the creative team is one of the reasons for WMS’s success in the face of the challenging economic conditions facing the industry,” says Stuart Gribble, Sales Manager, South-East Asia.
“Take, for example, the music and the sound of our machines. Not only do we have the best hardware for our sound systems, but we also have six full time musicians back in Chicago that do the soundtracks. We use real soundtracks. It’s not just an engineer pressing buttons on a computer keyboard. We’re very proud of that.”
Mr Gribble says creativity is a key element in defining WMS slot products. This extends to its relationship with operators as well as with the players.
“The casinos are as interested in product differentiation as we are,” he states.
“They want to know: ‘What’s different about my casino? What am I going to get people to come and see in my property that they can’t get somewhere else?’
“It’s not that we’re doing a lot of exclusive deals, it’s just that we’ve got so much new product coming in all the time, that it’s a question of grabbing something when it comes in order to be the first [operator to have that product].”
Competitive edge
“If you have an opportunity to grab some really good, innovative stuff from WMS, then for some period of time you’re going to gain a competitive edge,” explains Mr Gribble.
The pursuit of incremental changes to existing hit games is an established practice among slot makers across the world. WMS is not afraid to also innovate. It’s not, however, change for the sake of change, but carefully managed and researched innovation, helping both to broaden the company’s catalogue and to take players to new areas of entertainment they might not have experienced. An example is MONOPOLY Big Event™, the community slot game based on the world famous family board game from Hasbro. Just as with a game played on a home computer, players can change their ‘avatar’ or character in the game—for example, they can swap from the Boot to Scottie the dog if they feel it will give them a burst of good luck.
“If you think Scottie is going to be the big winner, then you would get the extra multiplier [associated with that character],” explains Mr Gribble.
“Cloning slot game play style and functions is not our thing. It’s about coming up with innovative designs,” he adds.
“Some work in some markets. WMS is not afraid to try new things. We’ve got a close enough relationship with our customers that they know we’re going to stand behind them.
Research
“The fact that we’re willing to invest the money in R&D—more than US$100 million a year in game development. That money goes into a lot of different stuff.
“We’re prepared to put something in [to the market] that’s a brand new concept, whether it be Money Burst™ or Cascading Reels™. They’re innovatively designed games that challenge [the industry status quo]. Those that stick, that’s great. Even if a game doesn’t perform as well as was initially hoped in a particular market, the customers [operators] know we will work with them to get something in that particular spot on the floor that works,” states Mr Gribble.
The relationship between ethnic Chinese slot players and slot products has come a long way since the days of the early Noughties when slots were categorised in Macau’s Chinese-language media and popular culture as ‘Hungry Tigers’—products to be wary of in the gaming ‘jungle’. That anxiety was twofold: first there was the concern (nowadays discounted) that games were somehow ‘fixed’; and second there were fears that like a real life tiger, slots would somehow ‘hunt’ the player, swallowing first the player’s money then metaphorically the player himself or herself.
“Back in 2004, when Sands [Macao] opened up they [operators] thought: ‘Oh, Asian players are going to need those three-reel mechanicals because not many will trust the video [games]. They’re going to think it’s rigged and that the computer’s going to take their money because it’s scripted,”” says Mr Gribble. But “they quickly learned over at Sands that nobody’s interested in the three-reels,” he adds.
“The mechanicals didn’t have anything to do with it. What the players are interested in is a high multiple of their bet as a possible win. They want to see 40-, 50-, 100-times their bet in a win—they want the high volatility.”
Big win
The phrase often used by Chinese people in this context is the game ‘gives them hope’.
“It’s all about the possibility of the player experiencing a life changing event in terms of the size of their win,” agrees Mr Gribble.
“The mass market in Macau is developing. It just needs time. I think it’s inevitable.
“Look at the mature markets such as Philippines and Genting [in Malaysia], you see these guys have been in operation for decades and the players have matured. You see a much more broadly based entertainment market and not just 6% or 7% of casino revenue coming from slots [as in Macau]—you see 30% or 40%.
While Asian players like the opportunities for high multiples on their original bet, they also often like value for money in the form of time on machine, says Mr Gribble.
Value
“You can also see, though, in places like [Melco Crown Entertainment’s local player-focused] Mocha Clubs and in the grind market that people don’t want to see their stake money vanish in an instant.”
A key component in the value proposition is free spins and free games, he adds.
“Free spins are what they like here in Macau. Our game developers spend a lot of time in Asia, talking to the customers, observing their play,” adds Mr Gribble.
“We have a good number of Mainland-born Chinese in our Sydney [Australia] design studio where we develop a good number of the Asian themed games. Back in Chicago, we develop a number of games there using Mainland-born Chinese. They’re tapped into the culture, they understand it very well, so the result is a lot of Asian themed games.”
The competition between manufacturers for the Chinese player segment in particular is arguably helping to drive up standards across the industry.
Language
“One hot topic in the industry is: ‘Does the game need to be in Chinese?'” states Mr Gribble.
“My answer is that an attractive, comfortable face to any game makes it more approachable and makes people more inclined to go up to say Samurai Master® and just try it out, because it looks familiar. If it doesn’t play right or doesn’t have the maths that you as a player are looking for, then you’re not going to stick around to play.
“One of the great challenges for the slot managers in Macau is to justify their dollar per square foot per day—forget about win per machine per day,” asserts Mr Gribble.
“If you’re looking at 6% to 8% revenue coming from slots in Macau, you want and need to broaden that. It’s clear that the profitability of a slot versus a table justifies it. “You just need to get enough of your revenue from there to justify the very expensive square footage that you’re taking up.
“Warehouses are littered with games from competitors that have tried to just slap eights on the game where sevens were, and put gold and red where the red white and blue used to be. The maths has absolutely got to be there,” states Mr Gribble.
“In some games that have more complexity, such as a ‘picking style’ bonus round, you’ve got to have Chinese on there. You’ve got to have some way of explaining it to the players.
Providing options
“Our philosophy at WMS is to translate everything into Chinese and then let the operator decide how to configure the machines. You can also have the option of letting the player decide. That’s the way [dual language] most of our machines are set up so the players can select for themselves.”
WMS says it has the same flexible approach to general game configuration with its operating partners.
“The BLUEBIRD 2 cabinets are all set up for server-based gaming, where you can download games and reconfigure the whole machine—the pay tables, the play field and the buttons. It’s going to create interesting interactions,” he explains.
“Almost all the games have the two-level local jackpot. The operator can configure it for himself. That’s another feature of WMS and Orion. We don’t demand that we, the manufacturer, reconfigure the entire machine based on our marketing needs. Operators can do it for themselves. It gives the slot manager a lot more freedom.”
Role for Orion
Orion is already known as a noted performer in the European market. As Mr Gribble explains, there are unassailable business reasons for having the WMS and Orion brands operating in tandem in the Asia Pacific markets.
“WMS and Orion support each other in Asia because Orion has technology that is different and complementary to WMS, and vice versa,” he explains.
A good example, he says, is Orion’s Group Wins™, a milestone product introduced at IGE 2009 in London. In the game, players group together and jointly win high prizes.
“Group Wins, like MONOPOLY Big Event—is a community gaming device,” states Mr Gribble.
“With Group Wins, the operator can purchase the game outright. With MONOPOLY, it’s a branded product from Hasbro, so we have to pay them a licensing fee. So we’re back where we have to do a participation deal to get that. In Asia, participation deals are not allowed in certain jurisdictions like here in Macau.
“Here [in Macau] you have to be joint venture partners,” he explains.
“Your name has to be on the licence somehow to get a share of the revenue. We have to do a lease hybrid model, where operators buy the base machine, then lease the software and the jackpot system. At the end of the lease they can always go back to a standalone machine.
“With the Orion community gaming device, you can buy it outright. It offers that degree of flexibility.”
