Gaming equipment manufacturers and supporters of the industry fired back Thursday against the notion that skill-based games are a failure. They contend more time is needed to show performance.
Marcus Prater, executive director of the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers, said Nevada’s 2015 senate bill that authorized skilled-based games, but regulations were not finalized, and slot companies began development more than a year later.
Brian Wyman, second from left, Georg Washington, second from right, and Marcus Prater, far right, at the UNLV conference.
“We’re not three years into this experiment, and some naysayers are calling it a failure,” Prater said during an educational session on gaming technology hosted by the University of Nevada Las Vegas. “I couldn’t disagree more.”
Prater said when he helped drive the bill through the Nevada Legislature the expectation was that it would be a five-year roll out. However, he has some consternation of where the industry is at in the process.
“I’m getting a little anxious that we need to have a few more hit game experiences to talk about, but we are two years away from that five-year rollout and just have a little patience,” Prater said. “Folks like Synergy Blue who are here today and all the companies in this space have dedicated tremendous resources to make this work, and I’m confident they will.”
As part of the day’s theme of manufacturers and operators working together, Prater said cooperation is important as companies try to identify casino partners to work with and give their games the best chance to succeed.
“We are in the early days, but I have high hopes for the future,” Prater said.
The panel included Georg Washington, president of skill-based manufacturer Synergy Blue, a California- company that will go before the Nevada Gaming Commission Thursday for a license to operate in the state.
Washington painted an optimistic tone about the future of skill-based gaming and discussed his company’s new survey of how 70 percent of casinos say they have or plan to or are considering adopting games with arcade-style play.
The survey showed 67 percent said skill-based games appeal to a new generation of gamblers and 46 percent said it increases the attractiveness of their casino by diversifying what they offer.
“The current landscape is a daunting one,” Washington said of the gaming floor. “Players expectations are changing, and they want new experiences and casinos must drive more growth without jeopardizing their bread and butter.”
As for why skill-based games haven’t been adopted more broadly, Washington said the regulation, licensing and compliance “is tough and it takes time to get through that.” Many casinos also lack the knowledge about skill-based games, he said.
Washington said many of his games have the same metrics as slots. However, because skill-based games are in their infancy, there aren’t comprehensive metrics for that segment as a whole. Casinos are tagging Generation X for its growth over the next five years, and that bodes well for those type of games, he said.
“It hasn’t been long enough or a variety of enough offerings,” Washington said. “The gaming floor of today is not what the gaming floor of tomorrow is going to look like. Skill-based gaming is still young, and we can expect a lot of changes and evolution over the few years as they games hit the market and skill-based games as a whole mature.”
During the February educational session at UNLV, Sandra Douglass Morgan, chairwoman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board talked about skill-based games have “not gained significant popularity on the casino floor.”
Some panelists talked about skill-based games needing their own space on the floor rather than mixing it with other slots.
Brian Wyman, senior vice president of operators and data analytics with The Innovation Group, said industry isn’t great about how to cluster games together like done in retail stores or grocery stores.
“I think about merchandizing the slot floor,” he said. “Do we create a men’s section and a women’s section like in a Nordstrom? Do we keep a younger people section and older people section? Do we create a section that appeals to video poker players next to poker area, table games area or sports books? These insights will be important as we get deeper into the data we collect.”
In the future, Wyman predicted slot companies will brand more aggressively and bid on casino real estate.
“Somebody said to me what’s the most exciting slot floor you have ever been on,” Wyman said. “I don’t recall what I said, but they said ‘you’re wrong. It’s G2E because they brand it well.’ I think we will see more of that as people understand the value of their brand. As companies do that, they’ll make a push that I want this type of signage for myself, and I want it front and center and not tucked in the back. The casino will say you will pay more for that or we’re going to pay less.”
People get recommendations on what to watch on Netflix but there are no such recommendations on what to play on the slot floor, Wyman said. That will become prevalent, he said.
There will be better revenue protection as well, Wyman said. When it comes to advantage play, he said the industry is a lot better “at detecting and foiling their schemes,” but there are other ways to protect revenue using data and analytics.
“I can’t look at a video poker player’s play and know whether they’re a good video poker player or not and that’s crazy because the machine has all that data. I want that data as an operator, and I can’t have it. I think over time we will see more and more of that combined with external data and have a much better view of players and what they’re up to.”
