Acclaimed gaming inventor John Acres believes he has built the foundation for meeting an ambitious goal: doubling American casino profits within 10 years.
“I’m 67 years old. The reason I get up every morning is I want to find the technology … that improves the player experience so much that twice as many players play for twice as long,” said the founder of Acres Manufacturing and a 2016 inductee to the American Gaming Association’s Gaming Hall of Fame.
The company announced in August that its Foundation system had begun enabling cashless wagering at three Penn National casinos in Pennsylvania. Acres said about 15 more casinos using Foundation will roll out cashless gaming by the end of the year.
Although calling Foundation the industry’s “most efficient, powerful, and economical method of cashless wagering,” Acres sees that application as the “low-hanging fruit” in improving the casino experience for players. Studies show that at least 60 percent of wagers come from casino ATMs, so using a digital wallet for slot machine or table game buy-ins can increase players’ time-on-device and provide a payment system already available at most non-gaming businesses.
Foundation goes far beyond that by collecting a treasure trove of real-time data. The company says the system reports 120 data points per spin, compared with 24 data points every 10 to 15 minutes from typical existing systems. Foundation monitors the amount of each buy-in, the denomination of each bill or TITO voucher, and each press of a slot button. It measures the pace of play and size of bet.
“We can start to paint a picture of (each) player’s mood and enthusiasm,” said Acres, who invented computerized player tracking, progressive slot jackpots, and instant bonuses. “Since we’re tracking their behavior in real time and tracking their credit meter in real time, we can see when the player is losing at an alarming rate for their history. Then we can deliver a bonus to help keep the player satisfied.
“We can adjust the player experience in real time, based upon the data that we. We’re doing nothing more than what Amazon has done for retail and Netflix has done for video.”
That “adjustment” would be in the form of a casino-determined bonus, such as a free drink delivered without an order or an award of free play. Awards also could be tied to outside events, such as the local team scoring a touchdown, hitting a home run, or scoring a goal.
But Acres said Foundation is “only the first step” in using technology for far-reaching improvements in the player experience.
“The really big step, which we call Coherence, is the combination of loyalty and the random number generator into a brand-new game experience, a brand-new game platform that will completely transform how casinos operate,” he said. The company has several patents for Coherence technology and has developed prototypes, but Acres said the system is still about two years from being available commercially. The company plans an initial public offering of stock early next year.
The emphasis on making players feel special goes back to Acres’ first job in the industry, working in the early 1970s for Norman Little, manager of Mr. Sy’s casino, a small operation in what was then the Fashion Square shopping plaza on the Las Vegas Strip.
Little taught that the most important part of gaming “happens between the players’ ears,” Acres recalled. “What does the player perceive this experience to be, what do they get frustrated by, and what do they like? Norman taught me the value of personalizing the experience for players.” That eventually led to Acres’ focus on player tracking and similar ways to make games more engaging.
Acres said the basis of slots hasn’t changed in decades: Pure luck decides when the reels line up for a player win. A machine’s random number generator operates independently from the loyalty information the machine collects.
“What we want to do is to take that data about the player and make that available to the game designer, so the game designer can incorporate the bonuses and the loyalty aspects into the game play,” Acres said.
While RNG-determined outcomes would not change, a machine could award instant bonuses that appear to come from a winning combination, he said.
“I believe that if we really start pushing these frontiers, if we rethink the player experience, … we can double the revenue of casinos in the next 10 years.”
