DIGIDEAL
After a three-year-plus enforced hiatus, DigiDeal is back on the gaming scene, and it’s a welcome return. President and CEO Michael Kuhn tell Casino International where they’ve been and where they came from…
DigiDeal W
hen DigiDeal was bought by IGT a few years ago, many in the industry – including Casino International – thought they would go on to great things. A change at the top of the
company meant that didn’t happen, but now the company is out on its own again and the order book is bulging. President, CEO and co-founder Michael Kuhn talks to Casino International about DigiDeal’s past, present and future.
Casino International: What was the genesis of the DigiDeal?
Michael Kuhn: I had a manufacturing background, nothing in gaming though other than the fact that I was a quasi-professional blackjack/poker player. There was no other exposure to that industry though. A former partner and co-founder of the company came to me just after I had sold a company that I had built up, with an idea to enter the industry with an automated card shuffler. After several approaches and me trying to thwart him, I said to him, “I’m fed up of hearing about the cards and what an issue they are, and the shufflers – if they’re such a big deal, let’s get rid of both!” That’s where our conversations on digital cards began. We started researching and filing patents, and the first few years were spent working on intellectual properties and working out the market, and building a prototype, and we went from there. We now have over 37 patents around electronic table gaming, and 20-plus pending.
CI: What lessons have you learned as the company has evolved?
MK: Two things we have learned are
persistence and resilience. When we started we went to see several gaming experts, and I mean the upper echelons of the industry, and our first indication were that we weren’t going to get any reasonable intellectual property coverage – which was not true at all, we have very strong IP – and that we would not get it
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approved as a gaming device – again, not true – and that players would never play it anyway. That was our homework, and it could have been discouraging. We were so far ahead of the bell curve that even the regulatory bodies did not have a category for us, they didn’t know what to classify us as. We were the first in our class in many, many jurisdictions; we still have areas where there’s concern as to whether we are a multiplayer slot or a table game and which classification we fall under. There is now so much flexibility built in the product that we can fit pretty much any jurisdiction out there by conforming the product to meet the requirements. We satisfy all the GLI 11s and 24s and variety of other table game or multiplayer slot requirements; we can be fully-hosted, semi-hosted, fully automated, we have connectivity between tables so we can run progressives, we can do tournament play, we can do a huge variety of things. We still run into obstacles, the industry has
changed so much but there is so much more acceptance of electronic multiplayer tables. The players always accepted it but the operators just didn’t offer it because we struggled to speak to the right person in the casino – should we talk to the slot manager or the table games manager? What we found was, the economics of the tables made so much sense that we should have been talking to the Chief Financial Officers instead! DigiDeal tables offer so much more control, flexibility for players, instant gratification in terms of larger jackpots, to play novelty games and sidebets with no worries about collusion… Operators can hire a different person to be a dealer, as they don’t have to train to deal Baccarat or whatever – you have to train them to be a host instead and put some life back into your casino floor.
CI: How have things changed from the early days? How has your approach changed?
MK: We’re just coming
in to the opportunity to go to casinos and show what we can offer with this type of platform; in
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