IGT won’t join slot organization

Tuesday, March 9, 1999 | 10:26 a.m.

The slot machine manufacturing industry, notorious for its competitiveness, is attempting to band together to make its machines more compatible with each other.

But members of the Gaming Manufacturers Association -- GAMMA -- will have to do it without the largest company in the industry. Reno-based International Game Technology has expressed no interest in joining with the GAMMA membership to establish communication standards on slot machines.

GAMMA, a nonprofit international association founded in October 1996, is dedicated to working with regulatory agencies to develop computer standards for the industry.

Although the industry's involvement in the high-profile battle over revenue-participation games has been in the headlines recently, association members only addressed computer protocol issues in a meeting Monday.

"The jumble of components from a mixture of vendors often results in an installation and service nightmare," said Marcus Prater, vice president of public relations for the association and director of marketing for Bally Gaming Systems.

"Casino operators end up compromising satisfaction while suppliers end up spending more time on patchwork fixes than creating games that will capture the attention of players and increase casino revenue," he said.

GAMMA's goal is to develop a standard computer protocol for all gaming electronics. That includes systems that control bill validators, coin acceptors, ticket printers, slot accounting, player tracking, bonusing, cashless and progressive machines.

The 17 gaming manufacturers that are members of GAMMA hope that by establishing computer standards they'll be able to focus more time on developing new products and less on figuring out to deliver information from one computer system to another.

Peter De Raedt, chairman of GAMMA and an executive with Aristocrat Inc., said IGT was invited to join the association, but has decided instead to keep its own standards in place. That puts the small manufacturers in a position of banding together to take on the giant of the industry, since IGT has a 60-70 percent market share.

"It's unprecedented in our industry for a group of manufacturers to agree on a standard," De Raedt said. "As a group, we may be able to get IGT to change its position. They've said they don't need us, that they can do better. In my opinion, that's a shortsighted approach."

Lyle Bell, vice president of gaming systems at IGT, said his company offered its own computer protocol to GAMMA -- but the organization didn't want it. As far as joining GAMMA and changing over all IGT machines to a new protocol, Bell said it would be an expensive proposition.

"Any kind of proposition has to be a win-win for everybody," Bell said. "Our system (called SAS) is about 10 years old. I think GAMMA wanted something new and fresh."

Bell said SAS already supports two types of protocols and most machines in the industry already communicate with one of them. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to shift to a new protocol, a move which would, in essence, require the reprogramming of thousands of IGT machines.

"We felt it was appropriate to use SAS as the starting point and let it be improved over a period of time," Bell said.

De Raedt compares the standoff to the computer industry battle between IBM and Apple in the 1980s. IBM eventually shared its protocols with other manufacturers in the industry and PC sales eventually surpassed those by Apple.

In a GAMMA meeting on Monday in Las Vegas, Rob Oseland, vice president of slot operations at the Bellagio hotel-casino, said maturing industries have historically taken a similar approach to developing operational standards in the market. He cited the automotive industry, the medical industry and the development of the Internet as examples.

GAMMA has established a two-year schedule for publication of its standards. It will distribute a preliminary version in May. Following a six-month evaluation period, the association will spend three months tweaking the product before releasing its final version in February 2000. Software is expected to be shipped by the second quarter of the year.

Last November, GAMMA sent a proposed uniform standard for slot machine light tower operations to the Division of Gaming Enforcement in Atlantic City, N.J.

Light towers are the cylindrical lights on top of slot machines that notify attendants when a patron is in need of change or help.

To attain the widest immediate compliance, GAMMA modeled its light tower standard on a two-tier light tower used by IGT.