SELECTING NEW GAMES FOR YOUR GAMING FLOOR

Picking a new game to add to your gaming floor is  an important decision to make and one that can often involve a financial risk. Even an average game conversion choice will cover its costs in a very short period of time, but selecting a game for a new machine is a more considerable purchase. There are some obvious ways to pick a good game, but here are a few different options that can be used to assist in making the best choice for your players.

Industry benchmarking tools 

Sometimes these are the easiest options and merely picking the top games from the rankings is a pretty simple way of picking a game that should work on your gaming floor. Its not always foolproof, with some manufacturers picking and choosing the timing and release of their games into the largest and highest turnover venues, but over time it is very reliable. Only the venues that pay for the benchmakring tools are included in the sampe so it can sometimes be skewed towards clubs with limited benefit to hotels, but again, over time, can certainly be accurate enough to choose a good game. The biggest downside is that there can be costly recurring fees to access the data for smaller venues such as hotels and small/medium clubs where having to choose only  a few conversion games each year doesn’t justify the cost

Use the reps

The gaming company sales representatives are great sources of information  on what’s working, and what isn’t, in the market. Despite the perception that they only recommend their own games, most reps are more sensible than that. They will recommend the best of their own games of course, but if you ask them directly they will also tell you what the best game options are from the other manufcaturers. This is a great way to test out the information you have gathered yourself on games. Remember the reps see more gaming machine ranking reports than most other people in the industry and while their opinion may be based on perception rather than hard data, unlike the data analysts, their perception is also based on seeing and playing the games.

Everything old is new again

Like any business, gaming manufacturers have to make the most profit out of the resources they have and games are frequently “cloned” or slightly adjusted and cloned, in order to make the most out of the maths and art they have invested in. Because of this, old games are frequently still with us, and should be just as effective now as they were originally. For example, IGT’s ‘Jetsetter’ and ‘Major Money’ games have been very successful over the years and always work well. When they launch a new version, it’s a fair bet they will work too and is a great purchase option.

Another example are Aristocrat’s Lightning Cash games where all the games in the range are very successful in any venue. The two new games ‘Heart Throb’ and ‘Tiki Fire’, even though they are new to the market, should be just as strong so purchasing them has limited risk. In fact, all of the Lghtning Cash range of games are slightly adjusted versions, with a link added, of old and very popular games and art.  If you look across your gaming floor, any game that has a three scatter trigger into a game feature with  a X2 multiplier is in fact a tweaked version of the old ‘Queen of the Nile’, and we can all point to a large number of ‘5 Dragons’ clones, that all still work well.

Trying something different

The downside to everyone using the same benchmarking tools to choose games is that we all end up with the same offering for our players. It’s like every single club in the country only having a Chinese restaurant, so sometimes having a point of difference, even in gaming,can pay off.  If you are buying a game conversion and want to try something new, try something when you first buy it mitigates the risk. If it doesn’t work you can generally change it under warranty fairly quickly, to a game with a better track record. In particular, this works well for mid and hgh denomination games where you are unsure of the market within your club or hotel. You can always change it if it doesn’t work. While most of the mid denomination market  these days are multigames, it is still worth trying out a solid 1cent game as a 5 cent verion just to provide a point of difference for a bigger