Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming March 2015 38 As Mr Payne puts it, “We want good ideas wherever they come from. You can see that certainly in the free-to-play casinos on a lot of the social sites. They add a lot more features to help monetize and help retain players.” Mr Nguyen is a California-educated software engineer whose background in IT led him into the industry by way of Silicon Gaming, a Palo Alto upstart whose innovative mid-‘90s slot concepts are still remembered for being ahead of their time. Mr Payne led Silicon’s game studio after parlaying a degree in film and television to become a producer for video game innovator Rocket Science Games. He’s been involved also in the creation of dozens of games for the US Class II, charitable games and lottery markets. Combined, they comprise a pedigree you’re not likely to find at most slot manufacturers, and Aspect isn’t timid about testing the limits of it, as it has recently with Macaroon Mania, to take one example of a title that wears its casual game roots on its sleeve. Macaroon Mania is an RNG disguised as a skills game whose object is to “collect” different-colored “macaroons” that pay different values depending on how many the player collects. The monitor shows a kind of serpentine which the macaroons traverse on their journey, with side tubes that let you see up to 35 of them at a time, of which only 25 count toward a payout. “So as they snake through there you really kind of have a little bit Tech Talk Macaroon Mania, in its way, speaks volumes about the bridge Aspect is intent on building between the world of social gaming and the world of the casino, and in the process to inspire the devotees of both to participate in them in entirely new ways. of anticipation of where they’re going to land,” explains Mr Payne. “It could look like something great, when in fact many of the colors that you’re trying to get to land there on the side, they’re not in play.” Macaroon Mania, in its way, speaks volumes about the bridge Aspect is intent on building between the world of social gaming and the world of the casino, and in the process to inspire the devotees of both to participate in them in entirely new ways. Of course, Mr Payne will be the first to acknowledge that when it comes to accepted standards of slot design and play mechanics, “There are not a lot of inflection points in our industry.” He’ll be the first as well to tell you that innovations such as Macaroon Mania will have to tread carefully around that fact if they’re to succeed. Then again, Aspect’s aim is high. “When you look at the casual games, a lot of them are still probability-based,” Mr Payne says. “So we thought if we can take a game and have it look like a casual game and make that math really align with what we need to offer our customers in the casinos, we can come up with a product that’s going to resonate with players that may not be slot players. Those are the guys that we’re looking for: people who are coming to Macau or other markets for the first time, maybe they have never been in a casino before, they feel like they don’t know how to play a slot machine, maybe they’re not interested in playing a slot machine. But they like the idea of a casual game type of thing and also being able to win money.”