"Our message at G2E was how casinos can improve their margins by reducing free play"

Less than two weeks ago, G2E Las Vegas gathered over 25,000 executives from around the world. While the event, deemed by many a success, concluded on October 10th,  the impact of it continues to resound among its attendees. 

During the expo, Yogonet sat down for an interview with Noah Acres of Acres Manufacturing, who spoke about how casinos can improve their margins by reducing free play. He also shed some light on how the company's solution Achievement Bonusing adds a level of gamification to the play experience, in addition to discussing other casino loyalty and technology advancements.

What can you tell us about this new edition of G2E? Acres is leaving quite an impression, with a booth at a privileged spot and plenty of signs across the venue.

We advertise pretty heavily here. We try to leave a really big impression. This year, our message is all about how to improve your margins by reducing free play and getting players to actually spend more of their own money. 

One of the novelties that you're presenting is a retail-themed bonus game. Can you tell us a bit more about it? 

Achievement Bonusing is really cool because it adds a level of gamification to the play experience. When you typically do bonusing in a casino, it's fairly random; bonuses happen just because. What we're doing is challenging the player to do something, like play a certain number of machines in a day, or come a certain number of days in a row, or hit a pay of $50 or more, or really anything that you want. Because Acres can track every slot event in real time, Achievement Bonusing allows us to respond to any event with a bonus or a message.

Near the hall's entrance, there is an Acres sign that says casinos are losing billions a year in free play. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

The sign says that casinos lose 37 billion annually to free play. And that is a fact because free play is around 20%, 25% of gross win. But that's only the face value of free play.

If you have, say, an hour of playtime and 15 minutes of your playtime is spent consuming the free play, then I've lost 25% of the revenue I can capture from you. That would have been 15 minutes that we could have made a profit from you, but we instead wasted the time using free play. If you add the lost time value of free play to the face value of free play across the US gaming industry, it is around $37 billion, which is astronomical.

Putting this in numbers gives you a perspective of how much money is being lost. Do you think the industry is taking note of this situation?

I think that casinos are picking up on it, but they can't do much about it with the technology that they have today. That's why we're really proud of the position that we are in with Acres. In terms of our technology, we have a really unique solution to help casinos delever from free play and help improve their margins. 

Cashless gaming is also a dominant theme for Acres, but it seems that, for this show, the focus is on the money lost on free play.

We always have cashless, but we're not showcasing it as heavily this G2E. What we're trying to do this year is make it easier for casinos to install the solutions. So when you do something like cashless, typically it requires the casino to install your hardware across the entire floor. And that's a really tough pill for a lot of casinos to swallow.

Now with the bonus solution, we can say, "Well, let's just put it on a bank of six games or a zone of 30 games." That becomes a lot easier for casinos to manage. It allows more casinos to get the benefit of our technology.  

Are casinos looking to leverage the Achievement Bonusing solution?

Absolutely. Casinos are really looking for a solution to free play, and we have bonuses that target free play. We also have some really cool bonuses that give away retail prizes, which I think is an industry first and really creative. We had a lot of really great reactions to that as well. 

We are now in the last quarter of the year and soon to start another one. What are some of your projections for the upcoming months? 

I think that the casinos are really looking for ways to optimize their services, and there's a lot of realization coming now that players don't just have an infinite amount of time to play. 

Most people just have an hour or two to play before they have to go get their kids or go to work. The more time that your players spend waiting in line at the ATM or waiting in line to get a player's card, or spending free play, that's money lost out of the casino's pocket. I think that casinos are realizing that and they're going to make a turn to address those issues.