Damien Connelly met with Max Lindenberg at NOVOMATIC Group headquarters in Austria

Are your Players Very Important?

Every single casino I have visited recently is making space for one machine: the NOVOSTAR V.I.P. slant top. In all my travels to visit and tour casinos, this is the first time I’ve witnessed every casino wanting to place the same machine on their floors.

NOVOMATIC has designed a real winner; one that generates over double the handle as the machines it replaces, according to Max Lindenberg, Director of Marketing for Austrian Gaming Industries. What’s even more intriguing, V.I.P. was created by the founder and majority shareholder of NOVOMATIC, Professor Johann F. Graf, himself, showing he still has the knack of understanding what players want.

A delicate balance between revenue and entertainment. Interview with Marcus Prater,Executive Director of the AGEM. Jack Bulavsky

Marcus Prater is Executive Director of the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers (AGEM), a non-profit international trade association representing manufacturers and suppliers of electronic gaming devices, systems, table games, online technology, key components and support products and services for the gaming industry. Its current membership of 147 companies in 21 countries is a who’s who of the supplier segment of the global gaming industry.

Jack Bulavsky, Special Assignment Correspondent for Casino Life in Las Vegas, spoke with Prater several weeks before the opening of G2E 2015.

Walter Bugno, CEO, IGT International chats to Jack Bulavsky

We last spoke six months ago. How would you now describe the company and the coming together of IGT and GTECH?

What really stands out to me is the complementarity of the two legacy organizations and how well the new IGT has come together. When we exhibited at G2E Asia and AGE, it truly felt like we were one unified team that had worked together for much longer than just the few months since the completion of the merger agreement. I’m very pleased to see how our customers have embraced the new IGT. The expanded depth and breadth of our product offerings enables us to address customer needs across games, systems and solutions, on a global level, like never before.

Surveillance Security at SkyCity Darwin by CCTV Specialist Vlado Damjanovski

SIMPLY AND QUIETLY

Back in 2008 something novel happened in our industry, which for most went unnoticed. This historical occurrence was a little mile-stone in the CCTV industry: the SkyCity Casino in Darwin changed its old analogue 350+ camera system, based on the famous Maxpro MAX-1000 analogue matrix, to a digital system. This wasn’t just a normal change; it was special because it was the first switchover from analogue matrix to digital network system without any downtime.