IGT
IGT sets the pace with sbX
T
IGT’s James Boje proudly displays an International Gaming Award
he rapid spread of technological developments, plus the appearance of gaming devices in the market place claiming server-based capabilities, especially in regions like Latin America,
was something that I had to get clear from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, when I visited James in his Amsterdam base. This disquietude had come to my attention after years of travelling the region and talking to operators who had the desire to engage and operate gaming’s new technology.
It had been difficult for me to put the record
straight in several occasions when asked to differentiate between downloadable games and server-based games, with special reference to International Game Technology’s revolutionary sbX system.
As language and neologisms go by,
the term ‘server-based’ had some facile translations into Spanish, and whereas it was easily understood by bilingual speakers well versed in modern Spanglish, Castilian speakers were somewhat miffed by the misuse of noun, verb, or both. This, of course, may not be of interest to the Anglo language speaker, but it is here to help the single language speaker bridge cultural and technological barriers.
Not being a total ignoramus on
server-based gaming, on account of a previous undertaking on behalf of a Korean company selling a horse racing digital system, I was familiar with the system where the game software is hosted in the central CPU, and the game content is
30 NOVEMBER 2010
James Boje, Managing Director IGT-Europe, spoke with International Editor Ricki Chavez-Munoz in Amsterdam about the development of server-based gaming in the region – and to clear up the difference between downloadable games and games hosted in their own cabinet servers…
communicated to interconnected terminals where players can bet on the images projected, also from CPU software, on to giant screens. The terminals are software-free and house, at most, a currency transaction unit in the form of coin, bill acceptor, or smart card reader. In a word, the terminals are dumb.
In dumb terminals, the game software is housed in
a central CPU site anywhere but within the slots machine cabinet, and without a direct gaming support data system to service and solutions during play controversies. All technical and software support is housed where the CPU is installed: away from the machine; and this is also referred to as server-based. Sometimes game content is communicated to the terminal via online signal with access via open Internet public providers.
Server based gaming content is part of gaming device
The difference between one and the other is that,
while systems like IGT’s sbX are endowed with game content as part of the gaming device and have the full support of cutting-edge technology within the machine’s environment; other systems have its gaming content travelling any distance from a few yards to a few time zones, with operators experiencing support that amounts to correspondence school tutorials with all the complications that distance learning entails.
In IGT’s Amsterdam headquarters that boasts a
bespoke showroom created to replicate a slots gaming room, Boje said: “The concept of server-based gaming is to have the ability to remotely install each game in any machine that you see here. It’s not just a matter of downloading a game to a terminal which is unable to service any problem that may arise. In other words, each one of these machines has all game data installed in the server to which it is connected, but it is downloaded to each machine along with all the
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