An MGM Resorts International vice president told the Global Gaming Expo Monday that players in their 20s who gravitated to casinos to gamble during the pandemic are “here to stay.”
Zachary Levine, vice president of table games strategy at MGM Resorts whose office is at Bellagio, also said MGM properties pivoted more of their floors to roulette during the pandemic to cater to younger players, who traditionally haven’t been into casino gambling. He spoke during a panel discussion on where gaming is going and said how they were seeing non-gaming customers gambling for the first time.
Plenty of those customers aren’t going away, because they’ve been “turned onto the gaming” experience by necessity of not having much else to do in resorts in 2020, Levine said.
“You had a customer base where a lot of 20-somethings’ trips into town consisted of dinner, a show, and a nightclub, and there might have been no gaming activity at all. For the bulk of 2020, there was no show and no nightclub. So we as the casino were the entertainment. That customer is here to stay. I think one of the things we may have permanently done is get the younger demographic to think of gambling as part of the trip or a significant part of the trip. They’ve discovered how much fun our product is.”
Part of the research in their table games’ department is that the game that skews the youngest is roulette, which takes no skill, Levine said.
“There are tons of skills in other games, but the game that was played the most by 20-somethings during the pandemic, as our demographics got younger, was that we had a higher percentage of the floor at MGM properties devoted to roulette wheels,” Levine said.
Levine also said he expects more of those in their 60s and 70s to return to casinos in greater numbers as the risk from the pandemic lessons, but the revelation during the pandemic has been that young people like to gamble. He said the industry shouldn’t be surprised by that, citing research at UNLV.
“People have been gambling on games of chance for 5,000 years, and I think it’s a little bit arrogant to think we’re the generation that stops gambling on the games of chance,” Levine said. “That’s always going to be there. Maybe something about the consumption mechanism is going to have to change, but the other piece is people like to gamble on things they know how to do.”
That makes it harder for new games to take hold, because people, especially the younger players, don’t want to risk their money on something they don’t know how to do, Levine said.
“People want to play games they’re familiar with, and I think games of chance are not going away, even among younger customers,” Levine said.
As for casino innovation, Levine said there’s been a lot more on the slot side than at the tables over the last decade. And the onus is on table games to catch up, he added.
“There are a lot of things that modern technology can allow you to do. The online world is providing opportunities we haven’t been able to take advantage of in the brick-and-mortar space, such as progressives based on multiple outcomes in a row,” he said. “The challenge is almost reverse engineering it from the online. There’s been a ton of online games where you can clearly say what it looks like in brick-and-mortar and how we can translate this online. Now it’s our time as brick-and-mortar operators to learn from what we’re seeing online, and that’s not only product and innovation, but also data.”
Levine said a lot of brick-and-mortar operators have online partnerships or, in MGM’s case, a co-ownership of BetMGM with Entain for igaming. What can be learned from online include side bets next to each other and trying different progressives, he said.
“You can get perfect data on what your customers actually like and translate that back onto the live casino floor,” Levine said.
Going forward, Levine said he would like the gaming industry to think of its competition as more than just casinos like MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, Wynn Resorts, Resorts World. and others. “I think the more we think about it as other entertainment options, the better.”
If casino companies just look at each other’s floors, they will eventually be eaten alive by the competition. “What happens if through sports betting, ESPN, which is owned by Disney and a global company, wants to get into that business and or what happens when places that have access to where your money is like Google and Apple decide to get in the gambling business? What I want to see in the next few years is companies like ours take a broader view on who their competitors are and use that to dictate our strategy and who who should be making these decisions.”
More voices and perspectives need to be heard, Levine said.
