Can you describe your product for our readership?
We make products that make the gaming experience more enjoyable for players, even as they lose. The whole point of gambling management is to make profit from player losses but help the player get an enjoyable experience in return. That enjoyable experience should boost their self-esteem and make them feel like a winner. Our goal is to provide rewards that make the player feel happy, make them remember the rewards they won rather than the money that they lost. If you won $100 dollars we want you to remember that rather than the $200 you lost.
As the experience goes on, the player reaches a frustration point – they have a budget of money, a budget of time and a budget of boredom. If you hit that budget of boredom where nothing much is happening, or you hit too many losses in a row, that’s when you want to leave. We make equipment that measures everything that’s happening on our machines: every button push, every slot insertion, every play; and if you take too many losses in a row, we will issue you with a reward. That reward is selected for you individually, according to your personality.
How has the product evolved over the last few years?
We know the destination we want to get to, but the obstacles are in infrastructure. We want to bring casinos into the modern era. Casinos are based upon doing marketing from the old ‘snail mail’ days – one offer a month or one offer a week. The internet has taught society to expect immediacy. To expect changes in the moment, especially if we’re talking about younger people.
However, we saw that the infrastructure for accomplishing that wasn’t there. For instance we see cashless as a key gateway for technology. We see a lot of opportunity to reduce that friction, but the other thing we see from cashless is that we get 100% player identification. So the issues I was talking about previously – getting to know your players personally – right now in the US, is based on the player identifying themselves with a player card. A lot of players for a lot of reasons don’t use those but, if you’re using cashless, we know who you are all the time. There’s no such thing as an anonymous player in cashless.
