If you navigate to the CDC Gaming Reports website and look at the right-hand column, you’ll notice a new heading called ReelMetrics. If you then click on the ReelHot Index in the menu box, you’ll get a set of impressively detailed statistics on recent slot machine performance. These charts are compiled from performance data submitted by over 100 casinos, housing more than 165,000 slots.
CDC Gaming Reports recently signed an agreement with ReelMetrics that allows some sharing of some of their data each month. ReelMetrics is a slot analytics provider, which doesn’t exactly make them unique in 2018. What does separate them from the pack is that much of their analytic work compares your operation to the nationwide database cited above.
It’s not a new idea to collect these sorts of data and then use them to generate predictive analytics. Various firms and individuals have talked about doing this for over a quarter of a century, and none of them had much success. The biggest stumbling block was the operators themselves, who were excited to see this type of information but didn’t necessarily want to participate themselves. They were always worried about confidentiality concerns, despite pledges that their submitted data would only be indexes, not actual numbers.
In my opinion, ReelMetrics is working where others failed for two reasons:
- They’ve put together an impressive team. It is headed by executives Nick Hogan, William Schoofs and John Boushy. That last name may seem familiar to some operators; Boushy served as CEO of Ameristar Casinos and has had senior management titles with both The Cosmopolitan and Caesars/Harrah’s. The credibility he generated over nearly two decades at Harrah’s as one of the industry’s best IT professionals was key in convincing many of ReelMetrics’ early subscribers. ReelMetrics is a private company and unaffiliated with any casino. While their website doesn’t list them, I know a few of their patrons and investors. Each of them, too, has a solid background in casino operations. Likewise, CEO Hogan has put together a strong team of analysts based in Leiden, Netherlands. While that’s nearly 5500 miles from Silicon Valley, they think their location is nearly equal in terms of intellectual heft and innovation. The local university there has produced 19 Nobel Prizes, and the city itself is home to the European Space Agency, Airbus, and several other tech leaders.
- They don’t just collect and distribute slot performance indexes. While that information is extremely valuable on its own, it doesn’t always tell the full story. Others, like the Eilers-Fantini Performance Database, provide similar index data. However, only ReelMetrics analyzes this information for trends and opportunities and then apply further exploration against each client’s own slot mix and performance. In addition to having the industry’s largest database with the most contributors, their expertise can make key differences in improving purchase decisions, optimizing configurations and spotting hits and misses quickly.
The agreement between CDC Gaming Reports and ReelMetrics gives us access to some of their findings, and in the near future, Frank Floor Talk will begin sharing with readers some of their studies targeting specific games, trends or patterns. While they save the most critical stuff for their paying subscribers, I think you’ll still find these snippets of wisdom helpful. According to our publisher Jeff Compton, “We think ReelMetrics provides some of the best analytical information in the industry, and we couldn’t be more delighted to share some of this insightful data with our subscribers/readers. In addition to articles in Frank Floor Talk, we’ll also publish regular monthly indexes, including Top Titles by Supplier.”
This month, the ReelHot Index for October 2018 includes that topic, along with four different datasets: one covering core game performance for the last 12 months, and three covering newly released games, core games, and premium game performances over the trailing three months. As Compton mentioned, some of the reports may vary month-to-month, but CDC and ReelMetrics will always present the table displaying the best games by supplier from the last 90 days, whether they’re core or premium. I urge you to take a closer look at this listing, which is the last chart displayed this month in the Index.
Indexes are extremely useful, both in this report and at your location. As a review of the topic, let’s say at your property the House Average (HA) for all games is $250 Theoretical Win Per Day Per Machine. If certain themes at your property were doing $180, their index would be 0.72 (180 /250). If another game (or games) was doing $535 the index would be 2.14. While indexes are common, there can be some traps to avoid. On an overall basis, it’s not always apples-to-apples when comparing $5 games to penny slots, for example. The same applies when comparing games in your strongest zone to those in the weakest/least-visited areas. For those reasons, ReelMetrics do indexes based on location, denom, vendor and game type, as I’m certain most of you do as well.
Finally, size often does matter. An index of 4.22 for Theo Win/Day (as shown in the Top Titles table for Aristocrat’s Panda Magic Dragon Link) is not that hard to obtain if your House Average (HA) is $100. The game would need to do $422, in other words. That’s easily achievable. But if your HA is $550, then these games would need to achieve $2,321. While that’s not implausible, it gets more difficult, since there’s only so much money that a game can accept during a 24/7/52 operating period. And finally, since this report lists only the one top game from each supplier, you don’t know if perhaps 20 or 30 games from one vendor are better than the very best game from another.
With all those caveats noted, this report is still extremely useful. If you knew nothing about slot performance and only had this one October 2018 report to judge our industry, you would conclude that Aristocrat’s Panda Magic Dragon Link, IGT’s Wheel of Fortune, and Scientific Games’ Dancing Drums were very strong games that should be on your floor. You might also surmise from the number of units installed in the last 90 days that Everi and Incredible Technologies are gaining ground on some of the traditional big suppliers. I’ve lived this stuff for the last 30 years and attended more seminars and workshops than I care to remember, and I’ve pretty much reached the same conclusions. Also, on the index of newly-released games Konami has one in the top five, Lion Carnival, and IGT also made this list with Temple of Fire. It’s good these days that the vendors are so competitive.
Other pearls of wisdom derived from the Index: good performance doesn’t always come from Premium games. On the list of top games from the 12 suppliers, you’ll see five core games. If you then examine the report on “Top-performing, widely-distributed Core game titles (trailing 12 month),” you’ll see that the lowest Theo Win of the five core games listed is 2.59. That two and a half times your HA. It’s great to see core games that you can purchase that are this strong.
All of the five reports contain trend percentages, indicated by red (declining), blue (so/so) and green (improving), and trends are, naturally, very useful for future planning and additional purchases. A game may have great numbers but could be down percentage-wise on these 90 or 365-day indexes. The data points listed on each report are CM category (Premium or Core); theme or Game Title; Supplier; Handle Pulls (GP), Theo Win (TW), Units (# of games in the database), Venues (# of casinos); GPTW (a combination of popularity [GP] and profitability [TW]); standard deviation; and, as mentioned above, trends for both performance and # of units deployed in their database of casinos.
Again, while we at CDC Gaming Reports cannot provide any of the analytics necessary to compare to your specific operation – you’ll have to subscribe to ReelMetrics for that – this is still very useful info. I just wish this Reel Hot Index and other reports were out there when I had my day job. In the future, the RM team will share some specific details not listed on these charts provided to CDC so that Frank Legato or I can share more with our readers in the coming months.
As we went to press, ReelMetrics let us know that each slot game listed on every one of the five reports shown is actually a “click-through” title. Click on the game name, and you’ll see some interesting additional info on each product, including an important timeline graph. – bf
