In this regular feature in IAG to celebrate 19 years covering the Asian gaming and leisure industry, we look back at our cover story from exactly 10 years ago, “Asia’s Game Makers … Small? Not any Any More”, to rediscover what was making the news in November 2014!
How far Asia’s slot machine industry has come since the liberalization of Macau and the opening up of new gaming jurisdictions in places like Singapore and the Philippines!
Only 10 years ago, Inside Asian Gaming took a deep dive into the state of the region’s slot machines – and more specifically their suppliers – at a time when the big boys of the industry were still establishing themselves in Asia and small, local companies fancied their chances of claiming some decent market share.
In our November 2014 cover story, titled “Asia’s Game Makers … Small? Not Any More”, we noted that local knowledge provided some of these smaller suppliers – think Singapore’s Weike, Macau’s LT Game and Shanghai’s Aspect Gaming – with the inside running against the larger corporates who were traditionally more familiar with the established markets of the US and Australia.
“Think back before Singapore opened up and Macau’s mass market took off, to the logistical obstacles the region posed, the fact that little was known in the West about the players and operators and how difficult it was to sell a board of directors in Las Vegas on the investment required to find out,” we wrote.
“One effect of this … was the opportunity this presented to a handful of game developers that were based in the region and spoke the languages and knew the cultures more or less first-hand. Moreover, they aren’t hobbled by towering corporate structures and a lot of demanding Wall Street investors and analysts.
“They’re small companies, relatively speaking, or certainly they were, with nothing like the capital resources of the multinationals, but then they don’t have to sell thousands of machines either to justify their stock prices. This freed them to innovate and armed them with precisely targeted products to move aggressively beginning a decade or so back into jurisdictions where most of the big names were reluctant at the time to tread.”
One supplier IAG spoke with at the time said, “Our wealth of knowledge is far superior to suppliers based outside of Asia. We are based in Asia, which gives us the advantage. ”
The supplier added that, “We are more efficient and flexible when we have to adapt to regulations and requirements for a market.”
It is, in hindsight, debatable whether these small, private suppliers have ever really been able to leverage that early mover advantage – and certainly the big guns like Aristocrat, Light & Wonder and IGT are now well entrenched in the region. All have offices in Macau and the Philippines at the very least and with dozens of staff on the ground too.
According to sources, the two modern-day giants of Asia’s slot machine market, Aristocrat and Light & Wonder, control a combined 90% of the market in Macau and the Philippines, and even more in some other Southeast Asian nations.
But opportunity still knocks for the little guys, particularly since COVID, when operators recognized a greater need to provide more opportunity for innovation on their gaming floors. As such, rapidly growing markets like the Philippines are proving particularly attractive to suppliers looking to boost their Asian presence or perhaps gain a foothold into the market that they’ve never been able to achieve before.
Compared to the situation a decade ago, it almost feels like a case of déjà vu.
