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Playing together
Community Gaming has moved from hard-wired slot tournaments of a few years ago, to the imminent, totally flexible, server-based slot floor… and it is offering new layers of attraction to players, while giving operators new tools to manage customer relationships more powerfully, as Graeme Kidd discovers.
People enjoy playing games together in groups, according to Kurt Quartier, IGT’s President of International Casino Markets, who looks after Europe, Asia, and Latin America for the company. His global perspective leads him to assert that there are no geographical or cultural boundaries to group gameplay… “Everybody plays card games. Everybody plays board games,” he says. “The games themselves may differ slightly, but it’s human nature to want to play a game in a group.”
Traditional table gaming lends itself naturally to group or community play. Since the earliest slot Tournament games sought to deliver a similar community element to the slot floor, community play has proved popular, and has been generally well-received by players and by operators.
Quartier says: “It’s an extension of what has happened with multi game Roulette stations, Baccarat stations, horseracing stations – where people are all in that same game together. Community Play is just extending that to video slots.”
“Players like the element of competition,” he says. “They like being in contact with other people – you are not just sat there by your lonesome self. Why do people go to casinos? Not just to gamble. It’s also to meet, greet, socialise and so on. That is an important aspect of the physical community games. It’s fun playing Wheel of Fortune Super Spin with a couple of friends. Community Play is the IGT community product, and Super Spin, which has now established itself internationally, was the first.”
WMS, too, is chasing that social aspect of community gaming, which involves “leveraging what the players’ expectations are and doing new things with it,” as VP Game Development for Worldwide Studios, Phil Gelber explains.
“When the big event happens, everyone is in it together, they are all cheering together, it starts to become like a live craps game where everyone wants the big outcome, because everyone wants to have a share in the win. Or in the case of a competitive game, where one person is going to win big, it’s kind of a special moment for that player.”
“The community game is usually a lively bank in a casino on a Friday night, with people yelling at it. It creates that kind of vital experience at the bank. That was one of our initial design goals three and a half years ago. With Monopoly Big Event what we wanted was a Craps-like experience, we wanted people angry and yelling, building excitement. It was a wild-fire success for us, and we have continued to build and leverage on that.”
Generating that excitement is important: “we put a lot of production values in, 3D effects – it gives a little more entertainment,” Gelber says. But It’s also about encouraging players to spend more and spend faster. WMS keeps in mind the gambling experience, and the operator’s priorities: “…the more the player bets, the higher the multiplier,” says Gelber. “If you are big gambler, you go in with a big multiplier, so you have your upside, versus someone who just wants to come in, spend a bit less and dabble, but still share in that experience equally.”
“An algorithm monitors where your consistent bet has been, how fast you are playing, and that gives you the multiplier. The multiplier moves dynamically depending on your speed of play and how much you are betting.”
Adding skills to gameplay
Skill-based gaming and time-based gaming may be features of future community slots – IGT’s acquisition of Cyberview, for instance, is a pointer in that direction, although for now, Quartier will only say so much: “There is potential for community gaming to evolve in that direction, without giving too much away…” he says, a little wryly.
Bally, of course has struck a deal for rights to early Atari videogame titles and aims to bring skill-based gaming to the general slot floor. “There are very few skill-based games in the world unless you go to Japan, where you get Pachinko. North America has zero to no skill-based games in a true live casino,” says Dan Savage, Bally Technologies’ Vice President of Marketing.
“From a strategic, demographic level, we are trying to bring skill-based games into the North American marketplace. Pong and Breakout are the first two we are launching; we’ll put them in the field in the second quarter this year, and we’ll follow them up with Centipede and Asteroids.”
That said, skill-based gaming is not where Bally is starting its foray into Community Gaming – or ‘Communitive Gaming’ as Savage describes it. Instead, Bally Technologies is seeking to open up a new niche with its DualVision system (see the panel out).
Introducing skill elements into gaming, particularly in the North American market comes with a significant regulatory overhead, so the current level of player interaction in the current generation community games is limited, although opportunities for interaction beyond making basic choices and towards actually having input into the outcome are there.
“Getting skill approved through compliance is extremely difficult,” says Bally’s Savage. “They all have to be random generators… we have got our first two skill-based games approved through compliance, and we will put those in the field second quarter. We are going to see how that works.”
Skill-based gaming may first start appearing on casino floors outside North America, reckons WMS’ Gelber: “Skill-based things get zipped closed with regulatory issues – you get a lot of problems in North America. Internationally, it is much easier. WMS partner Orion’s Treasure the World has player interaction for the community game. That’s the first time we have done that, because Orion goes into less regulated markets,” he says.
“Whatever decisions the Lucky Player makes in Treasure the World affects the outcome of the bonus for the whole bank. The Lucky Player Feature is a first step in the direction of getting player interaction into the community event. One player has more influence on the destiny of the bonus over the other players.”
The networked, server-based future
It is still comparatively early days for community gaming on the slot floor, with only a fraction of the potential yet achieved – mainly because the casino floor itself is still evolving. In the shorter term, technology is more likely to deliver accessibility to community gaming facilities to players and new marketing opportunities to operators than it is to deliver truly interactive, skill-based gaming to the generation raised on interactive console and computer games.
The networked floor and server-based management of machines are poised to present major opportunities to operators, opportunities that might have seemed unattainable in the early days of community gaming and the mechanical configuration of slot tournaments.
As Quartier recalls, the original slot tournaments, which were the very first iteration of community gaming, came with significant overheads. “In the old days, tournaments required you to physically change the firmware chip, to go to the machine, switch off the machine, enter a new chip into it, start it up again, rope it off, wait for a tournament to come up in six hours time, for the guys to come there – and in the meantime, you lost revenue,” he says.
Setting up a tournament was not only labour-intensive, but meant that the machines involved were unproductive for the rest of the day. “If you had tournaments on Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 11 o’clock, what you saw at most casinos was that those machines were turned off for the rest of the time,” Quartier recalls.
“Now, with server-based, that is no longer necessary. People can play the machines as normal until five minutes before. Or you can have the tournament across your whole floor – anybody who wants to enter the tournament can choose to enter it, while players who don’t want to join can carry on playing their normal game.”
Indeed, it’s clear that server-based, networked technology is likely to define the future of community gaming, as seen by both WMS and by IGT.
WMS saw the potential early, as Phil Gelber, Vice President Game Development for WMS explains: “As we started moving towards this networked gaming world, where you have these new technologies, the question to answer is how you use these new technologies – involving servers and games communicating with each other – to make the game play experience better. That’s how we headed down the community gaming road.”
Currently, community gaming is delivered bank-by-bank, and product-by-product. Jackpot and bonus systems can be progressive, and can involve a very local network or a wide area network across parts or all of a slot floor, or link up players in different properties, perhaps including players who are playing remotely, on-line, rather than on a casino floor.
The networked floor opens up these possibilities, which WMS, IGT and Atronic all have firmly in their sights. A networked floor enables floor-wide products, and server-based gaming gives new levels of control to operators. Atronic’s Crystal.net, for instance, provides more powerful channels for operators to communicate with and track players, thereby allowing operators to enhance player experience, perhaps using Galaxis Star Jackpots to configure mystery and progressive jackpots for groups of players.
WMS, for instance, has its Freedom Port technology. “It’s is our next-generation technology which allows us to embed games inside other games,” Gelber explains. “Community gamin will stop being just contained in a bank of machines, and will become a section of the casino – or the whole casino floor – as we start to get more of a networked floor. Networked floors are going to allow us to do more community-style products, and that’s something for which we have a lot of development effort going on in anticipation…we are developing a let of concepts there…next year, you will see a lot more networked gaming technologies using community gaming.”
“Right now, it is a bank-by-bank approach, self-contained networks – that is what the floors can support today. As the floors become more and more networked, it plays into a lot of the new technologies we are developing, and expanding community gaming – for instance, with world-wide leaderboards. That’s a step where we have machines talking to a central database in Reno, Nevada, keeping track of all the statistics and repopulating it out to all games. That is just added information, but as we start to get more floor machines networked it is really going to change the mix.”
Like WMS and Phil Gelber, IGT’s Kurt Quartier sees technology as enabling an exciting new future in terms of enhancing the player experience.
“Sever-based gives you bonusing, community gaming and all those kind of applications on steroids…it completely changes things. With sever-based gaming people tend to focus on download and configuration, which is a fantastic element and gets you to manage your floor and people are really excited about that. But it is these types of application, the Community Play type applications, which really change the player experience at the terminal. Sever-based opens up so many doors.”
“Community gaming will really start accelerating when we get to server-based,” Quartier says. “Server-based allows you to control your whole floor. You could have a community bonus game on your whole floor. You could have people accessing the same game…couples, for instance, playing in the same community game but at opposite ends of the casino.”
Bonusing, of course, was the first type of community gaming, where players try to qualify for a bonus. A future version of server-based gaming could allow operators to deliver a bonus game and make it is available on any machine on the floor, in a service window perhaps, or in the top digital display.
This opens the path to tailor-made offers to groups and allows operators to set up ‘virtual groups’ at will – the constraint of a physical bank of machines is removed, as Quartier explains: “You could have a BMW conference, say, come in over the weekend. There might be 500 people on the conference, so you design this bonus for the BMW delegates. They come in and via a ticket, via a card, or via a PIN number on the screen, identify themselves as being part of this conference, and at any time during that weekend they will be playing for a communal-style bonus that is only available to them.
“The operator can set up this kind of club or community at will, which means you can host family events, you can have conferences, you can have different tiers for regular players, whether it is silver, gold or platinum players, so that each tier plays for different types of bonus-style events.
“The power of server-based, what it brings in the way you manage that player experience, will take you further than anything you can do by just grouping a bunch of machines together. The integration between what you do on the game side, what you do on the player side and how you customise that for your operation starts becoming far more intense. Previously, if you wanted to go out and make specific bonuses for your BMW group, for example, that would involve you going round to every machine and doing something to every machine in order to set up that bonus. That can all be done centrally now, it can be a timed event, it can be qualified by tickets, or triggered by a player turning up at any machine and identifying himself as a member of the group.”
“Community gaming is a proven concept, which is why everybody is trying to do it. It will just get more and more exciting as we roll out server-based later in the year. Community gaming is the next step, and technology will really determine how far we take that,” Quartier concludes.
