Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | April 2014 8 COVER STORY Mr Oguchi has a 30-year track record of creating highly valued entertainment. He joined SEGA in 1984—his first job after graduation—leading the development of some of the company’s most popular video and arcade games and rising up the ranks to the position of president. In 2003, Japan’s largest pachinko machine manufacturer, Sammy Corporation, bought a controlling interest in SEGA, leading to the formation of SEGA SAMMY HOLDINGS. Mr Oguchi held various posts within the new entity and was eventually appointed chief creative officer in 2008, charged with overseeing all the creative endeavors of the group, including development of both new video games and pachinko products. When SEGA SAMMY CREATION was established last June as a new division to make EGMs for casinos, he was the obvious choice to lead it. At his disposal are many of the talented game developers he worked with at SEGA, and he has instructed them to throw out all the established concepts and come up with entirely new ones. He told them to imagine a keno game consisting of a huge tank of water filled with numbered balls, with a real dolphin inside bringing up random balls to determine the outcomes. “Of course, it wouldn’t pass GLI,” he quips, “but that’s the example I gave them to get them thinking completely out of the box.” Well-Timed Arrival SEGA SAMMY CREATION will unveil its first products to the global industry at this year’s G2E Asia at The Venetian Macao in May. Breaking into the Macau market is the holy grail for any new Asia-focused EGM supplier, and SEGA SAMMY will come knocking at an opportune time. Construction of the next wave of Cotai is in full swing, and owing to the Macau government’s imposition of a 3% annual cap on the growth in the market-wide number of live gaming tables—which stood at 5,750 at the end of 2013, according to official figures—the table allocation granted to most of the new resorts slated to open from 2015 will be much smaller than operators had hoped for. Cotai’s upcoming casinos will therefore need to install more electronic games to meet the shortfall. Furthermore, the limit on live tables has been driving up minimum bets on Macau’s mass-market floors—it’s hard to find tables offering minimums lower than HK$1,000 (US$128) these days. That compares with minimums ranging from US$7 to $50 at most The first and second rings on SEGA SAMMY’s big wheel game feature black positions marked “Go” that allow the ball to progress to the next ring. As the ball moves to each successive ring the payouts at each numbered position get bigger, and on the third and outermost ring are four positions triggering a four-level progressive jackpot. SEGA SAMMY CREATION’s update on the big wheel