Global economic conditions are once again being highlighted this year. A squeeze in spending can be applied to the casino environment during hard financial times or when significant capital expenditures are diverted to other areas of the business. In this blog, we will explore three minimal-cost solutions to drive revenue growth: conversions, game moves, and optimizing leases.

When considering opportunities to grow slot floor revenue, most operators will prioritize two levers:

1. Capital Spending - programs to purchase physical assets to improve the product suite, property amenities, and facilities.
2. Operational Spending - programs to increase marketing to customers by utilizing promotions, competitions, and events.

In the absence of any significant spend, many operators also make strategic decisions to optimize their slot floor. In this post, we explore the following three decisions that can help drive performance improvements with minimal spend:

• Conversions
• Game Moves
• Optimizing Leases
  

Conversions

To optimize the performance of your casino floor, it's important to review the performance of your cabinets by type. Even if you have 50 units of the same cabinet, it's likely that some games are underperforming while others are highly utilized. Before investing in new cabinets, it's crucial to sit down with your manufacturer's representative and discuss ways to maximize the performance of your current cabinets. This initial conversation can help identify opportunities for improving the performance of existing games and determining which games should have more copies on the floor.

In the example image above, the hypothetical casino should ask Vendor X to convert their underperforming Helix XT cabinet themes, like Game E and Game F, to the highly utilized, high Theoretical Win per unit per day themes, like Game A and Game B.

Before taking a title off the floor, it’s also imperative to understand location analytics and player behavior - what if it’s just a bad location or a ‘middle-seat’ effect on certain titles? What if some titles have a higher loyalty to high frequency customers albeit lower performance? Finding the right game to remove from the floor requires deeper insights.

Game Moves

As a follow-on to the previous point, deeper insights into the performance of each game title may uncover new opportunities. By regularly monitoring game performance, you can identify games that are underperforming in one location and over-occupied in another. Implement a solution that improves overall performance by moving games to create a better guest experience, redistribute traffic and create a balanced floor. We explore this idea in detail in this blog post: Should You Segment Your Slot Floor? 

This approach could also be used to replace other underperforming products in the same location.

In the example image above, the underperforming titles in Zone 1 (Game A) are similar in game mechanics to the strong titles in Zone 2. Moving the games from Zone 1 into Zone 2 would give customers a better experience of the titles they are seeking, and help boost floor performance. They could also take the place of the nearby underperforming games in Zone 2 (Game B) that have a high guest loyalty, indicating that customers will be able to find this game even if it is not in a premium location.

‍Maximizing the Value of Leased Products

Most casino floors have multiple leased games from the same manufacturer. However, performance may vary and it’s imperative to measure the right KPIs to determine the optimal balance of lease titles on the floor. Vendors should be held  accountable to ensure that each leased game is performing, and operators should also hold themselves accountable to measure the right benchmarks for leased products. The wrong benchmarks may actually hurt performance. By monitoring the performance of leased games and working with the manufacturer to optimize the games, operators can improve the overall performance of their casino floor without incurring additional costs. 

In the example image above, the hypothetical casino should ask Vendor Y to convert their underperforming lease games, like Game J and Game K, to the highly utilized, high theoretical win per unit per day games, like Game G and Game H.

Conclusion

With a clear understanding of the gaming floor data, operators can easily make strategic decisions that will optimize their floor at a minimal cost, even when capital isn’t available. The complexity is that it's a multi-dimensional problem with several factors at play - assessment of financial performance, operational performance, location analytics, and player analytics - to truly drive positive changes. 

Moreover, are the changes tracked or benchmarked once completed? Did it generate incremental revenue or simply ‘move money around’? Having access to the right data will help offer answers to these questions. 

Arming operators with the right software tools to make these decisions can be a winning strategy to drive profit growth. 

Look out for our next blog, which will look at three more low-cost ways to boost revenue.

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‍At Tangam, we are at the core of prescriptive analytics to transform how operators get the most out of their gaming floor, blending a wealth of knowledge in software development, data science, machine learning, visualization, and casino operations best practices. Our slot optimization product, SODA automatically generates recommendations with a quantified EBITDA lift to drive performance improvements with minimal capital spend.