Winning Asia plays to its casino gaming strengths while expanding in the online and hospitality markets
“I always play games in real casinos. I never play in test showrooms. When you are putting your own money into the machine in a live casino, you really get a feel for the games.”
So says Alice Tang, Director – Product Marketing for Macau based company Winning Asia Technology Ltd. The business offers a wide range of services to the gaming and tourism sectors in East and Southeast Asia. They cover three main product areas: land-based casino gaming; online casino and casual gaming and hospitality.
Winning Asia, founded in 2007, is a relatively young company compared to some of the big name gaming solutions providers in Macau, but it is growing quickly. Ms Tang puts that down to a number of factors, including a good understanding of the market in Macau and beyond, and the flexibility in approach of its staff.
Under the land-based casino heading, Winning Asia offers a range of services. These include: new product development by its own development team, product localisation for foreign slot manufacturers seeking to enter Macau or other Asian markets; testing of overseas product to check it is compatible with existing equipment in local markets; and partnership with equipment makers and/or casino operators in managing casino floors or slot halls.
Online offer
Under the online services heading, Winning Asia has multiple capabilities. It can build live casino Internet sites with live dealers; create back end systems to cope with the betting agent structure commonly needed to support transactions for online betting and casino sites in Asia (where the agent acts as go-between in issuing gambling credit to players and collecting debts) and in developing ‘soft’ games for the Internet café market in Mainland China.
“They include games a bit like fantan, based, for example, on stories from Chinese history. Our team will brainstorm and come up with the games,” says Ms Tang.
Fantan, or ‘fan-tan’, meaning ‘repeated divisions’ in Mandarin, is a traditional Chinese game. Although still played in some Macau casinos, it has largely been superseded by baccarat in Chinese players’ affections in modern times.
Fantan‘s simplicity does, however, lend itself to adaptation into soft gaming. A square is marked in the centre of a table or tablecloth, and the sides are marked one, two, three and four. The banker puts on the table a double handful of small counters or buttons that he covers with a metal bowl, known as ‘tan koi’.
The players then bet on the numbers, setting their stakes on the side of the square that bears the number selected. Players can also bet on the corners, for example between numbers two and three. When all bets are placed, the bowl is removed and the ‘tan kun’, or croupier, uses a small bamboo stick to remove the counters from the heap, four at a time, until the final batch is reached. If it contains four counters, the backer of number four wins; if three, the backer of number three wins and so on. The winner receives three times the amount of his stake less a 5% commission deducted by the banker.
Using the four sides of a square principle, one of Winning Asia’s Internet café offerings is a soccer game where players bet on which part of the goal an on-screen striker will hit the ball.
“The players can change the skill level of the penalty taker to get a better chance of betting successfully on the direction of the penalty kicks,” explains Ms Tang.
“There are seven levels of the game. If the player manages all seven, at that point a jackpot kicks in. We provide the games. It’s then up to the service operator to decide how they want to configure the payouts,” she adds.
One of Winning Asia’s platform partners in China for the soft gaming offer is C Y Foundation, a Hong Kong-listed company that runs a chain of Internet cafes.
Tourism marketing
Winning Asia’s third and most recent product line is its hospitality service. This involves marketing to Mainland Chinese customers intending to visit Macau.
“We try to bring customers from China to the hotels in Macau,” states Ms Tang.
“We have a very big network of shuttle buses that come into Macau. We have loyalty cards so customers can accumulate points when they buy bus tickets or when they buy services from us, such as hotel and bus packages. We’re not looking for big returns in the short term from the hospitality product strand. Long term, we do see it offering recurring revenue as our database grows.”
In land-based gaming, Winning Asia is operating a total of 400 slot machines and multiplayer terminals across the region, including 100 machines in Macau. It runs others in Cambodia and other parts of Indochina and on cruise ships operating out of Singapore. Winning Asia works with its partners flexibly as they and the market require. In some cases, the company acts in an outsourced management function, as happens on part of the floor at the Kam Pek Paradise Casino in Macau. At other times, it can work on a revenue participation basis, as a service agent, or as a combination of all three.
“We are not just equipment distributors,” stresses Ms Tang.
Hands on
“We are in the front line of the Asia market and we help partners to localise their machines, including all the translations, the graphics, the denominations and firmware for the local currencies and even the setting of the jackpots. We also give them product support.
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“We have our own team in Cambodia and Macau. We can work with partners to train technicians. Every month we have people visiting them to make sure the machines are running well, and to send them parts, etc.
“Most importantly, we tell partners what are the tastes and needs of the market—such as the mathematics of the games. That usually means more volatile games,” she points out.
“I travel around Asia to learn about other gaming markets. I stay in the casinos for a week and play every day to learn what the players actually do—their betting habits, the average bet, the games they play, and why some games are better than others in that market. It’s crucial to understand the people in that market. I talk to the players as one player to another player. That’s the only way you can learn,” she emphasises.
“I will spend hours on each game. Even if I’m losing, I will go for it. You’re investing in it. So I bet on my own machines in customers’ casinos. I will get a feel if a machine is for high rollers, or whether it’s offering ittybitty returns. Once we know what players like or don’t like, we can respond quickly in changing it. Sometimes we know before a casino operator whether a machine is working well or not,” adds Ms Tang.
Quality partners
Winning Asia’s formula involves picking its equipment partners just as diligently as it researches player preferences.
“We pick our partners very carefully. We don’t work with anyone. We work with people that value our insight and are willing to adapt products for the market,” states Ms Tang.
Three of Winning Asia’s partners in the region are EGT, from Europe, Advansys, the most established casino management system provider in Europe, and Spin 3, which is powered by Microgaming—the worldlargest online gaming provider.
Winning Asia has also used its detailed knowledge of Asian player preferences to develop its own multiplayer games in baccarat and roulette.
“They are now going through their GLI certification, so they should be done by the end of quarter one this year,” states Ms Tang.
Local knowledge
“On one of the baccarat games we developed previously on behalf of another manufacturer, our team actually asked one of the VIP rolling agents to teach us how to write the rolling chip process into the game program.
“To Chinese and other Asian baccarat players, what they want from a multiplayer baccarat machine is speed of play. They want that speed because they are betting on patterns [of cards]. They don’t need nice graphics. They need it to be smooth and quick,” explains Ms Tang.
“A lot of outside manufacturers don’t really understand that, or it takes them a while to learn it. Local people learn that at an early age. We know Chinese players better than anyone. It definitely gives Winning Asia a market advantage.”
