2004 Australasian Gaming Expo
Yesterday Gambling Guru attended the Australasian Gaming Expo held at the Sydney Convention Centre at Darling Harbour.
The expo is the main gaming industry event in Australian each year and is where Australia's gaming machine and equipment manufacturers display their new products for the coming year.
The major trend this year seems to be towards Twin screen poker machines, linked jackpot machines, multi-game machines and themed games.
Major exhibitors included Ainsworth, Aristocrat, IGT, Konami, StarGames, Pacific and Global Gaming Industries, plus many others.
An interesting session I attended was presented by Justine Channing, Manager Gaming Analysis for IGT Professional Services. Channing discussed the latest trends in gaming, in particular how they affected the Australian Market. Armed with research from the NSW and Queensland Markets she suggested that the best return to player was about 90% any higher and venues don't make money - any lower and the players won't play. She also suggested that the most popular and consistent games in the market were those with a feature where three or more scattered symbols triggers free spins. This type of game has been successful for many years with Aristocrat's "Queen of the Nile" starting the trend in about 1998. Channing suggests this type of game will be a consistent performer for at least the next three to four years. Next best is the bonusing type of game such as Aristocrat's Mr Cashman where players are offered a choice of bonus, these are also seen as peforming well in the near to medium term.
Based on this data, IGT and other manufacturers design games with the main variations being in artwork and graphics. Machine styles may also change but the type of game that appears on them will remain the same.
Also on show was a new trend towards dual screen machines such as IGT's BlueChip series. These machines use LCD monitors to not only display the game but also the artwork. The artwork display can change to display jackpots or special features. A similar concept is Ainsworth's Ambassador series which uses one large LCD screen to display the game and artwork together.
Many manufacturers displayed new linked jackpots including Ainsworth's Ozzy's Challenge, and Aristocrat's Pick-A-Box.
Aristocrat displayed its new Player's Choice machines which allows players to choose the denomination and game that they want to play from a selection of four popular Aristrocrat games.
Themed games are finally taking off in Australia after being big in the US for a long time. IGT have Sale of the Century and Aristocrat have Pick-A-Box (based on the late-1950's Australian Game Show) but StarGames and their alliance with WMS Gaming are the trendsetters in this area. StarGames games include Classic Thunderbirds (based on the children's tv show), and poker machines based on current and past game shows including The Price is Right, Press Your Luck, Blankety Blanks, and Family Feud and an american game show called Card Sharks.
What does this mean for responsible gambling? Its critical that we understand why manufacturers produce the games that they do. We also need to understand why some games are successful and some aren't. This is because they give us an indication of what is attracting players to poker machines and what is keeping them at the machine. In order to help people control their gambling we need to look at what is potentially helping them to lose control.
During the expo I also collected a lot of material produced by manufacturers and other stakeholders in the gaming industry. I will discuss these in later posts.
GG
