Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming November 2014 6 While most of the big names were playing the region’s emerging machine gaming markets from the sidelines, a determined group of niche suppliers, most of them locally based, stepped up to fill the breach. Lesser-known, perhaps, but just as creative, in many ways more nimble, and certainly aggressive, today, they’re taking more floor share than ever Asia’s Game Makers …Small? Not Any More ong before the Chinese came flooding into Macau to explode the fiction that Chinese don’t play slot machines, Asians were dropping coins and spinning reels with all the avidity of their neighbors in far-off Australia and the Americas. The big multinational manufacturers were slow to catch on to this. But that’s a facile statement to make from the vantage of hindsight. Think back before Singapore opened up and Macau’s mass market took off, to the logistical obstacles the region posed, the fact that little was known in the West about the players and operators and how difficult it was to sell a board of directors in Las Vegas on the investment required to find out. These were, after all, tiny markets compared to the slot hangars they were selling into in the US, and largely opaque, at least by Western standards, and daunting from a regulatory perspective. One effect of this—the greatest effect, really, the one that came to define East and Southeast Asia as the rich and sophisticated and intensely competitive machine gaming markets they are today—was the opportunity this presented to a handful of game developers that were based in the region and spoke the languages and knew the cultures more or less first-hand. Moreover, they aren’t hobbled by towering corporate structures and a lot of demanding Wall Street investors and analysts. They’re small companies, relatively speaking, or certainly they were, with nothing like the capital resources of the multinationals, but then they don’t have to sell thousands of machines either to justify their stock prices. This freed them to innovate and armed with precisely targeted products to move aggressively beginning a decade or so back into jurisdictions where most of the big names were reluctant at the time to tread. Cover Story L