SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
When Jim Murren, the chief executive of MGM Resorts International, suggests that change is coming to the slots floors of Las Vegas, it makes sense that participants in the online world as much as their land-based brethren should pay attention to his comments. Murren said in July that US casinos would “look different” in years to come with “more social settings, more interactive games, more social games where people are playing against each other”.
Yet he could have been articulating a plausible future for the gaming sector as a whole. In the world of online games, change is coming slowly and many within the sector blame the structure as much as obvious outside pressures such as regulation.
“The larger platform suppliers suffer when it comes to fostering creativity,” says Mark Paling, chief executive at independent gaming platform GECO Gaming. “They smother the aspect of the business that made it attractive in the first place. The games people often get blended into the casino teams and the drive for innovation can sometimes be lost.”
It doesn’t come down to a lack of games of offer – “the operators are insisting they need more variety of content” says Paling – but for Mark Rehorst-Smith, chief commercial officer at Core Gaming the long tail of games means there is too much choice but not enough differentiation.
“Operators are scared of changing the formula,” he says. “A lot of people just simply opt for the same old, same old. The industry is stagnant. It is very slow moving. It’s an industry which knows what it thinks it likes.”
As with innovation in other areas of gaming – notably recently in sports-betting where the line-up of copycat ‘cash out’ products now stretches around the metaphorical block – Rehorst-Smith notes that imitation is rife in games design. “This is typical for the industry,” he says. “Everyone waits and sees whether innovations work at the competition, and then piles in with a me-too product.”
Change, of course, is expensive not only in terms of the cost of production but also because of the price of failure. Steven Matsell, chief executive at Leander Games, points out that considering the exhaustive list of stages that a game has to go through to come to market, it is understandable why the creative spark might be lost.
“It takes two to three months to develop the game logic engine and integrate the game client to pass internal QA,” he says. “Then you have to provide languages; then we have the game externally tested for eight jurisdictions. The process of localisation and testing takes another four weeks, assuming no issues. Then we have to deliver the game to the operator and configure it to their individual settings. End-to-end we’re talking five months without glitches.”
Black Cow Technology supplies the open gaming architecture (OGA) software platform – in essence a game-server construction kit – used by GECO and founder Max Francis says the aim of his technology is to lower the cost and barriers to entry for games developers, and in the process help encourage the operators to take on new ideas.
“The OGA platform makes it easier for suppliers or operators to create their own custom game engines without the need to consider the capabilities of existing software,” he says. “The aim is for games developers to be able to build a game engine as an isolated piece of work and not worry about if the system can handle some great new piece of functionality.”
Paling says GECO is effectively allowing each games developer the opportunity to do their own R&D. “We give a games developer the scope to open the doors,” he adds.
Similarly working on an open development model is games development and content marketplace Odobo, and its chief executive Ashley Lang suggests his company is attempting to replicate the app model for iOS and iTunes. “We see this as underpinning the process by which developers can access and participate in the market, and at the same time reducing the investment needed,” he says. “We have opened up our programme.”
But simply adding creativity to the games development mix and hoping that will work is not enough. “It’s important for game developers to never lose sight of the fundamentals of the games – creativity without an appreciating of core dynamics of a gambling game,” says Lang. “The boundaries are technology. Games still need to perform. They need to trigger the right experience for the consumer. They need to offer the right risk/rewards.”
Ultimately, of course, how the game actually performs with the consumer will come down to the decisions taken by the operators. “They will decide whether a game succeeds or not,” says Paling. “It comes down to whether the games manager at the operator wishes to push any particular game, and whether it has a resonance with the consumer.”
How much any games developer is aware of the degree of resonance any one game gains with the ultimate end users is, though, open to question. “Operators are cautious of revealing too much information about players as they are a valuable asset of their business,” says Matsell. “Unfortunately this makes it difficult to understand player demographics and behaviours. Operators analyse the data and use it but they are one step removed from the games developers, so the benefit of that knowledge is pretty much lost.”
But progress is being made. Paling points out that although the route to market remains convoluted and time-consuming, the situation on the ground is improving slowly. “Businesses like GECO, Leander and Odobo are specifically targeting this sector, offering studios a quicker, more cost effective and most importantly more efficient way of delivering content to market,” he says. “Now a single game connection can deliver distribution via multiple operators and platforms.”
