Resilient is how a group of international panellists described the global gaming market when they spoke during last week’s seminar at the 2024 Australasian Gaming Expo (AGE), which was held at the International Convention and Exhibition Centre (ICC) Sydney.
On the panel was IGT senior vice president of global product management, Domenico Pastia; Ainsworth marketing VP Sean Evans; Quyen Pham, Interblock Innovation VP; and LNW Gaming senior vice president and chief product officer, Nathan Drane.
They discussed how global markets are currently handling the headwinds faced by the gaming and hospitality market.
Pastia pointed out how “gaming is proving to be extremely resilient”.
“Historically, we’ve been able to recover pretty fast. We were all worried after Covid that something would break. But in the gaming industry across the board in the US, Australia, EMEA … we’re seeing good market trends,” he continued.
Drane agreed that resiliency is the “perfect word” to describe the global gaming market.
“When we look at North America specifically, and we look at 2019 and compare that to 2022-23 and then looking forward in 2024, we saw 85,000 machines sold in 2019/20 and then we hit 89,000 last year and 95,000 in 2023. What we saw was a bounce back to pre-Covid levels. In Q1 this year, game sales were up 12 per cent pre-Covid,” he said.
It’s been a similar story in the Asia-Pacific region, according to Pham, who highlights that Interblock has seen “huge growth” in the Asia market, compared to the US and Europe.
“Asia-Pacific is actually the driving force for the company, and is keeping the company afloat, given all the challenges everyone’s going through.”
Pham added supply chains have also started to improve.
“We’re starting to see the lead time shorten, and we’re able to get our products out into the field – into the casinos and the clubs – a lot sooner than we otherwise did throughout Covid,” he said.
Regulation is a good thing
The group also agreed that regulation has a positive impact on the gaming industry.
“This is an industry that needs to be regulated,” according to Pastia.
“Because we’re not regulating this industry, the market we don’t want will take over. This happened in my country in the early 2000s. Naturally, it generated a lot of value for the state and the community, so regulation is good.”
He noted that for regulation to work effectively for government and industry, it needs to operate like a partnership.
“Once there is a partnership, you can help shape regulation in the way that makes for a great experience for the player and a great experience for whoever is interested,” he said, pointing to Canada as an example.
“It’s the only place in the world where you have a true omnichannel product where you can have shared liquidity between the jackpot in the [gaming machines] and the online side.”
Drane believes that regulators and industry share the same long-term goal.
“We’re all here for the long-term vibrancy of our industry, and regulations are critical to that,” he said.
“We want help for our plans. We want help for our venues, and those partnerships that we have with the regulations are critical.
“I don’t see regulations as inhibiting innovation in any way. We work with regulators hand-in-hand, and we also have our own burden to drive innovation and spend some of that money every year that we have to make sure we’re pushing this industry forward, and that could be technology, that could be a system solution, or it could be games – I think innovation can come in so many different ways.”