Interactive ALTERNATIVE PAYMENTS
Many of today’s slots developers hail from the days of pinball manufacturing. Why is it that so few video-game developers took the leap into real money gaming?
First, I’d say that in the past there was a fear of entering new business areas, even one adjacent to existing areas of expertise. You have to take a leap of faith and grasp new opportunities, which in the past was something that scared investors. The second reason, is that when you have a team of developers who are very good at creating, let’s say a racing game, you don’t want to divert their ener- gies in a new, uncharted direction. We didn’t have the facility to create real-money games in the past, and the idea of external partnership wasn’t part of the existing business. Finding a studio like Pariplay that can bring Atari’s games to a whole new audience is extremely exciting and allows our developers to continue to make the games that they love making.
What does Atari bring to social and real-money games that we haven’t seen before?
The community is the most important element that we bring to both real money and social gam- ing. Ultimately, a slot game is a slot game. Yes, we’re going to have the best game-play, in both gambling and skill-gaming terms, but there’s so much more you can do to really innovate in terms of the environment and community. If I play an Atari game, I want to be able to interact and chat with others like me. If I go to Atari Casino, I’m there sharing an experience with players who have the same interests as me. If I visit other websites I find myself in unfamiliar surroundings, with language, culture and social differences, which are all barriers to the gaming community. There’s less pleasure in experiencing games when you’re not part of the shared community.
I believe that you have to be connected with your audience to be able to create a community experi- ence. You have to understand and appreciate what motivates your players. If you play a social game, for example, with prizes that enable you to win, for example, a coffee machine, you’ve got to be 100 per cent sure that your audience is looking for multiple coffee machines for their home. You have to offer the rewards that the player is look- ing for from their gaming experience. If you visit Las Vegas, you visit and play in the casino in which you’re most comfortable, which suits you and which fits they way you want to play. You want to be part of an environment and play in a community of like-minded people. Visiting the Hard Rock, the Wynn or MGM says something about the person you are and about the commu- nity in which you want to play. Players want to identify with the games and the people playing those games and it’s the same for both Atari’s social and real money communities online.
If your target market is the generation of players that grew up on classic Atari console titles, can you still draw a new generation of younger players to these games?
It’s something will learn as we go. Young players will head to the Atari brand, just as they did in 70s and 80s, because it’s part of pop culture. The games we create today, like Rollercoaster Tycoon, are as relevant to the young people playing right now as those who enjoyed Centipede and Asteroids as beloved brands from their past. Atari is here for the long-term, this is not a hit and run project. If it were short-term, I’d have entered into a traditional licensing agreement and used a third-party to host the games and create the com- munity.
Gaming mechanics and ‘hooks’ are notoriously rigid and fixed when it comes to free-to-play, play
for fun and real money gaming. How do you walk that tightrope between player engagement for a real money reward, as opposed to a high score challenge?
I think for us, the balance has to be weighted towards the gambling experience. You have to satisfy the players. In terms of walking a ‘tightrope’ between engagement and reward, that’s the challenge of great game design. We’ve got to analyse the feedback of the players and grow this community. As I said, this is a long-term project for Atari to create its own online commu- nity of players. We’re not expecting instant suc- cess, instant results. To date, we have created more than 20 curations, add-ons to Rollercoaster Tycoon, tweaking and changing the game as we grow. It’s all about satisfying the community and you can only do that by listening to their feedback and responding.
The expectation is that you’ll be launching with a series of classic brands in Q4, but is there the potential to create new IP under the Atari brand that will excite the real-money audience?
There’s always room for new games. As we’re launching Atari Casino, there’s an audience expectation that they’ll be playing all the famous games and brands, but as this is a long-term ven- ture, we know that we can introduce new games very rapidly as we progress. For us, this is a natu- ral extension of the business, from video games, to skill games and real money slot games.
It is going to be a great site with great games and a real community centered around those games. You can only achieve this if you are involved as an operator in the process. Players need to know that they are playing in Atari’s community, not with a third-party licensor. I think this is good for the audience and will be good for Atari too.
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