ECLIPSING THE CLASS II SLOTS MARKET

Eclipse Gaming Systems CEO Tim Minard speaks to Gaming America about Tribal partnerships, slot influencers and how casino manufacturers can step up their game.

What are the advantages of working mainly with Tribal operators? And why does your company have a preference for working with them?

Eclipse was founded in 2008 and it’s probably not exclusive, but the vast majority of our clients are Tribally based, and it all stems from years and years of relationships – the Tribal market is one I’ve always been passionate about. Class II is typically also a strong revenue-share market. It’s nice to be able to partner up with our clients and succeed with them, and that’s another driver there. It’s all about all the relationships we have. We’ve served the Tribal population for a long time, I believe, helping their economic progress. These casinos have been an enormous catapult for them and we actively participate in that. That’s where the whole concept of ‘beyond the game’ and the idea of having an impact on these Tribes comes from. So we feel like we can have an impact on these Tribes by giving them good products, services and relationships.

Having also worked with commercial operators, what are the main differences here? Well, I would say there are differences for sure. From a preference standpoint, I really appreciate the relationships we have. We have at least 41 customers that we’re really intimate with, and we’ve gotten to know well. We feel that the commercial sector is not relationship driven. It’s just a different prospect to that of Tribes. I feel with the amount of things we can do together, you feel it in their own communities. We have both, the products are the same. We mostly focus on Class II and then we have some VLT customers as well. So with video lottery, there may be a little difference in their licensing and things like that; but from a customer standpoint, we try to give the best service to anybody and everybody. Dealing with Tribes for so many years, my personal experience has just been fantastic.

What were the personal highlights of G2E 2022 for you?

We launched a new booth structure. So from a visual standpoint, we put together – in a short amount of time – a square booth that was beautifully put together and displayed our products. We featured a number of our new series slot machines, ones that are ready to go out the door. I thought the lineup of games we had was great and we featured some Tribal art in our booth. That was amazing.

We had slot influencers, so we did a number of things that were different than our typical years in the past. I think we stepped up our game, so to speak, and I felt like the overall presence of our booth, how it was put together, was done extraordinarily well.

Our Cash Arcade series was a big hit and that was a big positive for me seeing that out there. I’ve been passionate about that particular game, and the customers responded really well, because it has features they hadn’t seen done the way we’ve done it – we had a great response to it. We had a nice little bar and it’s always great to socialize with your customers at the end of the day. Our booth was indicative of our smaller but more intense relationship with clients.

Which product over the last 12 to 18 months would you say you’re most proud of in terms of success, popularity and how it has been marketed?

The one I mentioned – the Cash Arcade series, and the Big Shake Carnival, which features an element that is a digital coin pusher that physically participates in the game itself. If you can win on the reels, you can win on the coin deck; you can also win through bonus rounds and so on.

So it’s a really fun game and we’re excited to launch it. We had to work very hard because the physics engines and everything else that made this game come together forced us to do a lot more work on it. Whenever you put that much effort into something, it’s really rewarding when the customers and end users respond. And we put it out in the market after the show – we’ve seen very good success and good numbers.

So I’m certain there’s more to come from that because we probably only got a third of our ideas into that game. But there’s so much more to make into that Cash Arcade series that we’re excited about. I think in every one of the casinos where we operate, we were above house average – well above. We’re excited about the performance of that game, that’s the kind of interactive development we like.

So you say it was a push feature on the machine, could you expand on the features included?

We have a patent applied for that, but it’s a very unique one. The way we do it, you can hit on the reel spinning, but if you don’t, you still have a final chance to hit from the coins falling off. And then the progressives get put onto the coin deck so you can have multiple addresses on there that could be pushed off. And if you push Max, more coins fall onto the deck. So the coins literally come into play and it’s a lot of fun.

Then the features can both have free spins, or you can have a ‘frenzy round’ where coins are just falling and you participate by sliding the coins where you want the coins to fall. So there’s an arrow and you push the side that has the most coins falling off, and that one is called ‘rapid fire.’

Then there’s the Big Shake, which is when the whole machine shakes and a lot of coins fall off that deck multipliers put onto the deck so a multiplier can fall off. So it’s almost a graphical representation of what you see, coming straight at you.

Have you had YouTube influencers such as Brian Christopher play on your slots?

He has, he’s been in our booth at the last couple of gaming shows and he has played a lot at our slots; he stopped by our booth at G2E and played the Cash Arcade games. We have not done an actual live stream with him yet, but I know him personally. We did do a live stream in our booth with another influencer Josh Duffy from Slotaholic.

What is the most effective method you have of attracting new customers and attracting new customer bases?

It’s a small community in the Class II world and word of mouth is a big deal. Your games speak for themselves. Customers vote with their money and so if you have a good game, and the game's playing well, that word travels fast. But not every game can be a home run and it takes those relationships to figure out how to work with the Tribes, to figure out what kind of customers go into their facilities and how they like to play their games. We find the closer-knit relationships with the Tribes presents us with the opportunity to get to know their customers better and give them the ride they’re looking for, given the entertainment value of what they’re trying to do.

From that, I think you can gather that relationships are the biggest factor in getting to know the Tribes intimately. It’s different to the commercial world where you have states that participate, so you’ve got compliance at the state level and the various jurisdictions tied to their casinos. With Tribes it’s mostly embodied in them, so you can get to be very familiar with all levels of the Tribe. This also ties them to ‘beyond the game’ here, so again, I want to not just be a vendor to these guys. I really want to be a partner – ‘beyond the game’ to us means getting involved in the things that matter to them, creating successes for us that create miracles for them.

We participated in education drives where we gave backpacks to two Tribes, Northern Quest and Prayer Band. We put toys in there. We’ve been recognized at the Peach Bowl football game for some of the things we’ve done, namely our efforts to support students who are mostly from Tribes. They do their golf outings and we participate in all those things, but we really care about what the initiative is. What are they trying to do? We want to participate in that. That level of relationship is what I’m talking about here. And those types of activities helped drive our customer base as well. We still have to make great games but, hopefully, they like us and choose us because we’ll be authentic; and will really try to make a difference. As our relationship grows, it is almost like a friendship.

Finally, as a game provider, what have you done to make your products more secure in light of cybersecurity issues?

We enhance the cybersecurity that a casino has to take because, obviously, they have to be driving at large audiences. That’s a big factor for them and for us. As we’re Class II, a lot of all of our classic games are linked to a server. We take everything on a 24/7 basis. We put the latest protocols in the latest firewalls. We do multi-factor authentication through security link enterprise. When we use remote access for our servers, we’re using the industry best, in terms of protocols and firewalls and things like that.

So you have to knock on wood. We have had no threats of breaches in that world. It’s just the nature of our world because we’re networked-based games. We’ve always had to get that level of standard, as we couldn’t afford to have something bad like that happen in terms of PR.