A year ago, the Indian Gaming Tradeshow & Convention served as a pivotal point for the newly formed Aruze Gaming Global. Now known as AG2, the company continued to build on that success at the recent Indian Gaming Association show in San Diego, as it’s set to launch many game titles and a new cabinet by the end of June.
“If you look at Indian gaming overall, it represents 40% to 45% of all revenue in North America,” said Mike Sands, senior vice president of sales for AG2. “It’s a very important segment. It’s important to tribes and important to us.”
Sands said their new cabinet, the Muso Summit, was very well received at the show ahead of its launch. It’s a portrait cabinet, 49 inches, with 4k graphics and dedicated content.
“We showed it once at G2E and the buzz was great from our customers,” Sands said. “We made some adjustments from the prototypes to the commercial launch. We’re probably two months away from full-scale commercial launch, but we’re excited to say we just put our first bank into Barona Resort & Casino (March 28), with performance testing over the next 30 days.”
Sands said what’s unique about the Muso Summit compared to previous cabinets is the monitor has an LED that’s not only integrated into the game play, but seamless on the monitor. “You can see how it comes together and really reflects a way we can communicate wins and integration to the player.”
The plan is to do a full-scale commercial launch by the end of June in almost every market AG2 does business in North America.
“Other markets will be after that,” Sands said. “We’ll have a big marketing focus and media campaign around it at G2E, but based on performance testing happening over the next 30 days, we plan to bring this to market by June.”
Sands said they’ve had good performance so far. The goal of a beta test is to place it in a casino environment around people and see how it performs and how the LED and game integration work. The next step after the beta test is performance testing ahead of the launch, he added.
AG2’s biggest selling cabinet is the Muso 55. With the company’s content this year, it’s launching 38 titles, 12 of which are dedicated to the Muso Summit, Sands said.
“The rest will support other cabinets such as the Muso 55 and the dual screen cabinets,” Sands said. “What’s exciting is we continue to be in the top 10 (Top Indexing Games – Core, Parent Theme) on Eilers with our Triple Treasure Pot game (out for six months) over a sustained period of time. We’re looking for more of our content to be bubbling up on Eilers. We’re taking a different approach on how we bring products to market.”
In the past, AG2 came out with a large quantity of themes with one or two good game-play mechanics and they cloned those, Sands said.
“Instead of coming out with 50 titles this year, we’re coming out with a smaller number, where we qualify the ideas behind that and really vet the ideas across the organization on what goes to market,” Sands said. “The idea is to increase our hit frequency of successful titles. We’re really excited about our strategy, our content, and providing earning solutions for our operator/partners out there.”
