G3 spoke to Acres Manufacturing’s Noah Acres in the week following the G2E show in Las Vegas to discuss the new systems solution from the company - Foundation.
Noah, what’s the background to Foundation?
If you look at legacy slot systems in the US and Asia, there are four primary systems providers: Aristocrat, Konami, IGT and Scientific Games. Te dirty secret of the industry is that the hardware powering all these systems was created in the late 1990s - early 2000s. It’s the primary reason why this industry lags so far behind in terms of technology.
Coming at this problem, we were trying to create applications using the data from these legacy systems. We found that the more installations we performed, the harder the systems providers worked to keep us out of their environments. Tey want to be one-stop-shops for everything systems-related and sought to keep us out and stop us from consuming their data. So not only did we meet resistance from the suppliers, but the data wasn’t great in the first place.
Slot machines speak SAS (Slot Accounting System), which writes around 120-150 rows of machine data, but the way the legacy systems work is that they only collect around 20 rows of SAS data, with the majority simply lost to the ether. Compounding the issue is that data is only collected at specific intervals.
Legacy systems run a meter-reading report on system events, such as card-in, card-out or bill- in or bill-out, these types of events. So if you’re a players inserting 50 dollars into a game, the system is not monitoring your play, it’s recording after the fact. Te interval to the next report means the player has most likely cashed-out before you’re made aware of their play. If the casino wants to market or communicate with that player, the opportunity is lost. Tere is no option with the legacy systems to market and communicate in real-time while the player is at the slot machine.
Foundation addresses these issues?
What Foundation does is that it collects all of the data in real-time and instead of blocking others from our environment, we welcome them. Te fundamental change is that the casino controls that data. Foundation includes an interface that allows the casino to change the credit metre on any slot machine at any time. Tis allows them to implement any type of bonusing and any type of cashless.
Most large scale operators today are looking for a single wallet solution that works at any slot machine or table game in their portfolio of properties. Using Foundation, operators can blend real-time data with the wallet solution, allowing them to layer on real-time messaging and bonusing into the app.
What is the Foundation environment?
Our Foundation environment starts with the hardware that we place inside the slot machine. You unplug the legacy system and plug our device into the SAS port of the game and
second and cash-out is exactly the same process and it’s just as fast.
So Blender doesn’t process the payment itself?
Noah Acres, Acres Manufacturing Company
“Even to this day, casinos in the US are still direct mailing their customers. Every casino wants to add players to their mailing list in order to send them snail mail. It’s what businesses did back in the 1990s, but now that
everything is digital and driven through mobile devices, the
technology that was adequate for that era is no longer viable today.”
Noah Acres
reconnect the legacy system to our device. Te legacy system operates as normal, but we send our data to another piece of hardware located at bank level and ultimately, all that data goes to an environment that we call the ‘Blender.’
If you imagine a firehose, the Blender is a firehose of data. Our system does not store any data. We give the casino all the API documentation that they need to request the data that they need from the Blender. So the casino gets to decide what they want to store and how they want to utilise that data. Foundation lets casinos own, possess and control all their own data.
If you want to build an application that communicates with your slot games, that application interfaces with the Blender. One example is cashless - if a player wants to add credit to a slot machine via the Penn App, the request is communicated via wifi or the cellular network to the payment processor’s network, which verifies the account and the available funds. Te payment processor is interfaced with the Blender and credit is sent to the player’s phone.
As the player calls up the transaction on the App, simultaneously a Bluetooth sensor within the specific slot on the floor communicates with the App. Funds are transferred to that slot with confirmation of the game title on the App. All of this communication takes thousandths of a
Tat’s right, we don’t process any payments. We interface with the payments processor of choice. Penn National chose Everi as its payment processor, which has a cashless solution called the CashClub Wallet, which allows players to move money from a bank account or card into their CashClub Wallet. Everi handles the transaction between the bank and the phone App, but without Foundation they have no way to transfer those funds to the game. We consider Foundation as the last piece of the pipe that connects the outside world to the game.
We can connect to any external payments processor, bonus provider or analytical tool - anything the casino authorises. Te great thing is that everything is modular. We don’t need to find out what’s allowed or not by the banks. We partner with experts like Everi and benefit from the separation of duties.
Is Foundation practical for uncarded / anonymous play?
Te casino industry works in a back-to-front manner when it comes to data. Operators ask new players to register with their loyalty programme and reveal everything about themselves so the casino can decide how/if it wants to reward their play. It’s the exact opposite of how Facebook operates, whereby you get to try things for free and if you like it - then they start to charge you for the privilege.
So to answer your question about uncarded play, because we collect so much more data, we are able to identify where an uncarded session begins and ends. Te fact that a legacy system infrequently pulls data means that its SAS checks miss the point at which an uncarded player leaves a device. It won’t register that the player has left until another player inserts their card into the machine and generates another pull of the data. Right now, casinos can’t identify the start and end of uncarded sessions, but because our data is so granular we can identify every session.
Why have system suppliers continued pulling those 20 rows of data from SAS and not sought to evolve beyond this?
If you look at what casinos wanted to accomplish 20 years ago in the late 1990s early 2000s, even to this day, casinos in the US are still direct mailing their customers. Every casino wants to add players to their mailing list in order to send them snail mail. It’s what businesses did back in the 1990s, but now that everything is digital and driven through mobile devices, the technology that was adequate for that era is no longer viable today.
In the last 20 years we have at least doubled the number of casinos in the US. Tere has been a massive increase in the number of operations as new states and tribal gaming expanded the casino offer. However, instead of working on efficiencies to improve operations, the casino industry has just been scaling - making what
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