only casino to have it on the gaming floor.
IGT Triple Towers MPS Horseracing – Currently we are first and only casino that offers this product. Spilt between our Non-Smoking and Smoking gaming floor, these have proven very popular during the first few months of activation.
Bally’s Playboy Hotzone and IGT’s Sex in the City, Bomb’s Away and Crystal Fortune are also all new and attracting a lot of attention on the gaming floor.
Most popular product – We still see the well established multicoin/ multi line Aristocrat games shooting the lights out in terms of handle footprint. The traditional 9 Line and 20 Line games with good volatility and frequency of features are solid performers month on month and continuously dominate the list of top performing Slot machines here.
Portfolio of machines: Generally we look at replacing Slot machines that have reached a seven year shelf life period on the gaming floor and have fully depreciated on our books. For strategic purposes and where a product is reliable, popular and has a strong support base from a manufacturer, the life may be extended (e.g Universal Ultra Slot steppers and IGT S2000 steppers). We have benefited tremendously with new product over the first half of this financial year, with over 250 new machine installations taking place already. We have a wonderful variety of the newest and freshest product available on our gaming floor.
Having recently fully integrated from coin to SMART over a 2 year period, our new machine strategy over the last 3 years has been based around planning for this, which meant replacing the products that are incompatible on this new system. Poor performing products are continually monitored and where the machine is near or at the end of its cycle, new product is brought in. With the newer product that is not performing to expectations or floor average, there is a lot of flexibility now days with conversions that can done and this usually improves performance without having to replace machines prior to the reaching the 7yr period (e.g full game conversion and ability to alternate between stepper and video using the same cabinet or vice versa). We have always had a very well established and loyal traditional stepper/coin market here and our greatest challenge has been bringing in new product and maintaining the balance between stepper and video and maintaining this loyalty.
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Historically the older popular stepper products were dominated by a very strong Aruze/IGT base, which slowly moved to a stronger Aruze base in the last 2 yrs. Now with most of the manufactures developing new Stepper product it has made this transition a little easier, although with a lot of unfamiliar newer product – some manufacturers have got the games right and gained a share of the stepper market.
Our Slot machines are statistically some of the hardest working slot machines in the country in terms of games played on a monthly basis given the grind action nature of our business at Suncoast.
Are all of your slot machines linked and what systems software do you use?
We run IGT Advantage SMART and are currently fully coinless.
We developed the IGT Advantage system that was initially coin based with IGT Africa over the past five years.We migrated from IGT Advantage Coin to IGT Advantage coinless and skipped the Tito phase for strategic reasons. The operating system is world class and is fully integrated with Cash desk , Club desk and Marketing from a Bonussing prowess point of view. Given the vast IT related migration hurdles we were facing at the time the migration was complex however, the end result was worth the pain. It is my understanding that Suncoast is the only operator in the World running IGT Advantage SMART Coinless.
We have also recently succesfully migrated one of our smaller properties namely Hemmingway’s Casino from Coin to the same version of this amazing operating platform.
Do you have TITO / Smart cards? Smart Cards only.
How closely do you work with your marketing team on gaming promotions – both live and slots ?
Gaming and Marketing synergies and effective collaboration between these two key role players is essential to the success of any Casino operation and as such these two departments work hand in hand with interdependency been the guiding philosophy. I also do not see the Product as merely Slots and Tables the product we market together is our entire precinct arsenal/ our established brand and this is well understood by
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