As worlds converge, Light & Wonder is leveraging its leading land-based systems business and digital account management platform to deliver a 360-degree view of the player.
Rich Schneider, chief product officer at Light & Wonder, said their goal is to become the leading cross-platform global gaming company. Light & Wonder wants to have their great game content available anytime and anywhere a player wants to access that in a casino, on a social channel or online.
“We see the systems business as playing a key role in this expansion across multiple channels,” he said.
“Just like in a casino, our systems allow it to understand the player and track play. We view it as game enablement. If you didn’t have our systems, you wouldn’t be able to play our games. We’re seeing the same thing as convergence happens in that operators will be able to use this content across channels. They’re going to want to understand how their players are reacting to this, what channels they’re playing, and how to offer them promotions and features that would entice players to that brand.”
Schneider said their research shows that in markets where people are able to play digitally and online, in five U.S. states, Canada and Europe, that players want to play the same game online that they do in the casino. Operators want to be able to cross-promote games as well, and in the social space, Light & Wonder has similar content launching in land-based and social casinos.
“In talking to players, they are doing both, even though they’re playing for a different experience in the social space knowing they’re not going to win money,” Schneider shared. “They still find the games equally entertaining and fun.”
Light & Wonder is the leading supplier of casino management systems, he noted. With the arrival of digital, technology has shifted in many ways. One is how IT infrastructure is no longer run on premise but in the cloud. All new products will be cloud enabled, he said.
“You can just imagine how computing has changed in the last 10 years, and we’re retooling our systems to keep up and take advantage of all of the things that modern technology has to offer, ” said Schneider.
Operators choosing a modern infrastructure approach like the cloud allows them to disassociate themselves from the ongoing cost of maintaining an on-premise server infrastructure, he explained.
“Those servers, hard drives and storage – all of that data and computing infrastructure – are quite expensive and become old in the modern world relatively quickly,”
said Schneider. “If you move on the cloud, it’s really Google and everyone else’s job to maintain and upgrade that infrastructure for you. That ends up cutting costs – not only the capital cost of buying all that equipment but the maintenance cost of having people on staff. Virtually every industry has gone through this, and it’s been extremely beneficial. It’s time for casino operators to take advantage of this as well.”
Schneider said the modern systems are easier on which to develop and find developers who have the skills to do it. He believes that Light & Wonder’s ability to innovate and create products that are compelling and relevant speeds up that process.
“We’re able to deliver innovation and new products quicker when we’ve had this upgraded system,” he said. “If you talk to any casino operator, they’re waiting for a system provider to give this, this, and this to me. Switching to a modern architecture of a system allows us to deliver that much quicker. It’s important to an operator because while we deliver our great games, it also allows them to differentiate their combined offering of resort, promotions and gaming offerings from the casino across the street.”
Schneider said it’s been a growing multi-year investment for the systems business because it’s such a strategic asset. About a year ago, Light & Wonder began laying out a roadmap to its systems modernization that will come out during the second quarter.
“It’s a multiple release roadmap that will happen over a three-year timeline,” he said. “We just released for approval our second one in this sequence, and that will lay the foundation of what we need to do in the base system in order to build on top of that.”
Schneider reported that the installations will begin within the next month or two and that several customers are on the list. Every four to six months, they will have one release coming out, and that will continue for the next three years.
Light & Wonder also has new products that it’s offering to customers, including Player Boutique, an application that coordinates merchandise giveaways to patrons. They are also offering Managed Services to help maintain systems and ensure security patches are in place.
“This is us saying let us look across the spectrum to everything that you do and maintain and make your system secure,” Schneider said. “Rather than hiring people to do that, pay us a fee and we’ll have experts that come in and do that. That dovetails well with us modernizing our system and the story of reduced operating costs.”
Their Unified Wallet is another focus that’s in multiple locations and more installations are coming as there’s a greater emphasis on cashless, he added.
“We also have a Slot Event Aggregator,” said Schneider. “The slot machines give a lot of information when a player plays. It gives the wager amount, the outcome and what else was happening. In real time with any activity with a machine, a message gets generated. Historically, those messages were maintained inside the slot machine and sent out periodically. The networks weren’t fast enough to send that information, but with modern casino floors, we can send that data in real time. That provides an opportunity for casinos to analyze what’s happening in case you want to respond in real time on the screen or on their mobile device. It’s a powerful tool and responds to requests from customers who want to have access to data their system provides them.”
Schneider said they’ll be sharing information on investments in modernizing systems at their Light & Wonder Systems User Conference in June at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.
