Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | June 2012 24 models at Bally. We’re quite flexible. You know, looking at a fee per day style basis, or even what we call hybrid models where we purchase the hardware and box outright, and put a license fee on the actual game on a daily basis. But, of course, participation is probably more attractive to you than a license fee model, would you say? Well, participation’s agreatmodel dependingon theperformance of the game, obviously. We work within the regulations of each jurisdiction we work in. It seems Macau is facing a bit of a lull because it’s going to be at least three years until the next big wave of property openings on Cotai. Are you concerned about keeping the business growing here in light of the lull in property openings? No. Obviously, Macau has been very driven by new property openings the last 7 or 8 years, but it will still be a huge market for us. We’ve partnered with a number of casinos on the systems side of our business. And also we’re finally starting to see a replacement market on the games side. We’re about 8 years since Sands Macao opened in 2004, so we’re finally starting to see the end of some product life cycles and casinos are starting to see that shift. So although new property openings may not be as prevalent as they were the last couple of years, we are starting to see casinos start to refresh their floors. Outside of Macau, though, there are some other markets throughout the region, as you know—the Philippines, Vietnam— that are going to open some large scale properties in the next 12 to 36 months. So the Asia Pacific region we’re still very, very positive about And of course you’ve got some products specifically targeted for those markets as well. Absolutely. A couple of mystery products that we released that we actually designed specifically for Asia as well. There’s Golden Empire, a theme-based mystery link that we designed specifically for the Macau and Asian market. And then we developed another one called Jeepney Joyride for the Philippines that we’re very excited about. That’s about to launch in Pagcor casinos very soon. I n the second part of the video interview, Bally Technologies Managing Director of Asia-Pacific Kurt Gissane was under the spotlight, speaking about the company’s latest products designed specifically for Asian markets. The transcript of the interview with Mr Gissane follows. Kareem Jalal: You’ve got a lot or products here specifically designed for Asian markets. Can you take us through the process of how those were developed? Kurt Gissane : Sure. We’ve got a couple of different strategies here at Bally, and most recently what I’mmost excited about is we’ve actually set up a region-specific development team focused on doing games for the Asia-Pacific region. So this team, based out of India, is focused on making games purely for our Asia-Pacific market. I’m very excited about that because for the first time we’ve got some targeted, specific games designed for us. And I guess you personally are having a lot of interaction with that team. Absolutely. And we’re also in the process of bringing on a person that will be our liaison between Asia-Pacific operators and customers, myself obviously and our team here in Macau, and also the developers themselves. So what games have been going well for Bally in Asia? We’ve had two strategies. One, we’ve got a lot of premium products that are doing particularly well for us at the moment. Mainly Cash Wizard, Cash Spin, Vegas Hits, which have been very, very flagship premium-style products for us. These have all been translated into full Chinese for the Macau market and we’ve had some great success there. So they were global games released globally and done very well for us in other parts of the world, but that’s been our sort of niche, targeted premium-style games. And more recently what we’ve released at the show is more core video, Asian-themed, Asian-designed and region-specific. Even games like Beijing Treasures, as you’ll see here on the Curve, Asian themed and translated into Chinese for the Macau market. So what else do you have high hopes for that you’ve got on display here? Well, obviously our licensed themes. One of the most exciting things we’ve launched at the show is Michael Jackson, and also Grease and Betty Boop. So three large licenses. Michael Jackson we’re obviously particularly excited about because we believe he’s got great international appeal. So we hope to have that approved [in Macau] in the next couple of months and see it in casinos very soon. Now of course these licensed games in the US would generally be run on a revenue share or participation basis, but that’s not allowed here in Macau. So how do you plan to supply them here? The participation-style model is not allowed in Macau, like a share of cash box if you will, but they still allow some form of licensing on a fixed fee basis. So we have a number of different Asia Focused Asian-themed games at Bally’s G2E Asia 2012 stand INSIGHTS