AGS is stepping up its games, showing off the company’s first high-denomination slot and expanding a table-game side bet with a progressive jackpot fed by wagers throughout the pit area.
The additions reflect the company’s commitment to “have an offering for all parts of a customer’s floor,” said Jackson Floyd, senior director of product management. The AGS booth at the Global Gaming Expo spotlights how the company is adding products in all three of its divisions: electronic gaming machines, table game products, and interactive.
The growth continues a trend. AGS offers eight slot cabinets this year, up from three in 2017. Game production has increased each year for the past three years, with the library offering more than 300 titles. The booth boasts 37 new slot games, six tables, and an interactive area.
Floyd called the high-denom arena “a brand-new space for us” after concentrating on penny video single-screen games. “This is incremental to our core business,” he added. Two high-denom titles, Mega Diamond and Gold Inferno, are available now, while 8x Crystal Bells and Platinum 8x8x8x will be available before April 2023.
He said operators could see success by placing them in a high-limit room or just outside.
“We’re committed to invest in this silo going forward. It will be a defined product segment for us in the future,” Floyd said. “This is a space that we’ve never been in, but we knew we could compete toe-to-toe with the best.”
Mega Diamond and Gold Inferno are nine-line multidenominational games, with players able to choose a per-credit value of 25 cents to $5. Floyd says higher denomination play results in high-value symbols appearing more frequently. The display of various jackpot sizes incudes flames that appear to be behind the numbers, with their height and intensity giving players a visual clue of how close the jackpots are to hitting.
Another new offering in the slot division is the Spectra UR43 slot cabinet, which has a 43-inch UltraHD 4K portrait monitor, game-controlled lighting, and seamless video linking capabilities when machines are banked together. Spectra boasts the deepest content pipeline of any AGS cabinet launch, including new concepts and extensions of AGS’s player-favorites. The AGS portfolio supports Class II, Class III, Historical Horse Racing, Latin American, and online markets.
On the table-game side, the Bonus Spin Xtreme side bet offers a new trigger for craps and an additional “mystery spin” bonus feature, furthering its ability to link multiple game types on a floor. The design allows for one progressive jackpot winner on games such as roulette, blackjack, baccarat, craps, sic bo, and poker derivatives. A triggering event – for example, a blackjack dealer showing an “Extreme 16,” a six with a 10-value card – leads to the first spin, which awards a prize to everyone at that table who made a Bonus Spin wager. The roulette-style wheel spins to show the value of the prize and randomly picks a seat number. If the person in that seat made the wager, they get to spin a larger wheel, which awards a bigger individual prize.
“It’s a community type of progressive,” said John Hemberger, senior vice president of table products. “You’re all winning together.”
Other table products include the single-deck Pax S shuffler, which speeds up proprietary games by shuffling and dispensing cards; it also includes card recognition technology. Hemberger said AGS has received approval for the Pax S in all North American jurisdictions and it is available now.
AGS also is demonstrating its first interactive table games, Criss Cross Poker and blackjack
AGS, based in Las Vegas, has a strong history with the Class II tribal gaming market but has evolved into a commercial gaming supplier as well.
AGS is at G2E booth 1253.
