David Snook discovers why promotion is key to a successful tournament.
Suppliers will claim that using coin-operated machines for tournaments can increase the cashbox by 50 per cent. It is a little like a car salesman telling you that a new vehicle will hold its value…But even with a ‘pinch of salt’, the claims for cashbox uplift are not entirely without merit.
Having spoken with a few operators, there is no question that running tournaments has proved worthwhile - perhaps 30 per cent is a nearer average. But that is easily enough to make an operator look at a machine in a rather different way.
The problem of course is that tournaments need organising. They are a little like ticket redemption machines, they demand a lot more effort from the operator. In many countries of Europe, however, the operators have the benefit of AWP machines and they, bluntly, make you lazy.
Why spend a fortune in time and effort to build up leagues and competitions, or buy in fluffy toys and build redemption counters, when you can simply place an AWP in a corner of a location, switch it on and remember to come and collect the money from it every week?
Reality is beginning to kick in…taxes on the income of AWPs, licensing problems, image problems, even legislation problems, make AWPs sufficiently awkward a business proposition these days to ensure that the prudent operator looks at some kind of insurance. That insurance can come from adding other elements to their business and running tournaments is one good way of doing it.
Sports themed games are of course the most obvious. For many years, operators in Germany and Spain, in particular, have run major competitions with soft-tipped darts. Table soccer has been around even longer - most operators on both sides of the Atlantic remember Lee Peppard’s Tournament Soccer days. Now Lee is running hugely successful tournaments in south-east Asia for his Medalist darts games. Pool has always been a hot favourite and perhaps pre-dates table soccer tournaments.
From the pool table business grew a number of specialist operators who dealt only in pool and ran tournaments and local leagues. They all said, to a man, that without tournaments, income would be a fraction of cashbox results supported by tournaments.
Soccer competitions have been run for years by Roberto Sport in Italy and still are. Marco Borettaz, president of the company, said: "Tournaments were helped by the formation of the International Table Soccer Federation, which ran the first European Championship in 2002."
His own competition is the World Championship Roberto Sport, which attracts players from 20 different countries. "A tournament is an investment and the key word is ‘sponsor’. If you have a good one that helps in covering expenses and prizes, then success is guaranteed." He ran his 2009 event in Prague - most organisers of international events tend to move them around.
"Soccer table tournaments are the X factor in global coin-op. Tournaments have become far more focused now that the ITSF has involved huge media participation such as the Eurosport television channel."
Bringing it more up to date, all of those product sources for tournament games still exist today, employed just as enthusiastically. Adrian Buckley at Diana Marketing in Spain, brings in Arachnid soft-tipped electronic darts games and swears by their success used in tournaments. He just concluded the XVII Bullshooter Europe competition, held in the Netherlands. But there are other Bullshooter competitions in Asia (this year in Hong Kong), North America and other regions, with the winners all getting prizes, which include trips to the Bullshooter finals in Chicago. Prize money from the global tournament will top US$125,000 this year.
"Promotion, promotion, promotion," said Buckley, asked what works with darts. "To create a sport and not a game, you must create a hero. Then someone has to beat the number one player to give us a new hero. This raises player interest, a competitive spirit, and they will all come to a tournament.
"At a lower level, run a weekly darts league night in a pub or bar, so that the less able player has an interest and the cashbox is boosted. Simultaneously run qualifiers for local tournaments within your own operation, with a finals night. Then put the winner into a regional Bullshooter competition. It keeps things moving, keeps income up….it’s all about promotion."
So why are soft-tipped darts so successful everywhere except in the UK? "The UK has always had the best steel-tipped darts players and a culture of steel tips in pubs. That is hard to overcome, but we are now working with some leading UK operators to demonstrate that soft-tipped darts will work in the UK too."
Tournaments, he adds interestingly, do not seem to be affected by the worldwide recession which has also hit coin machine income.
Bringing the problem back to the operators’ inherent reluctance to become involved in extra work (sorry, but it is true), Buckley and quite a few other suppliers with other types of equipment report that they take much of the work out of the operation.
Charts and other paperwork are provided by the supplier of the equipment to make it easier, even software packages are supplied to cater for all of the organisation and management of leagues and tournaments.
Barcelona’s Gaelco, which makes Radikal Darts, has even perfected a way to enable players to compete with one-another from remote locations with elaborate anti-cheat systems.
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But tournaments can be added to many different types of games. I remember walking through MAF’s excellent Magic Planet FEC at the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, with local distributor Prakash Vivekanand of ASI. Big video games dominated the entrance of the location and I commented that they represented a high cost but necessary embellishment to a location. "Not at all. Big video games can make serious money," he said.
"Too many operators complain that they are expensive and take too long to give a ROI, or suggest that they can’t even get their investment back. We have demonstrated that if a multi-player driving game ?is used in a tournament, then it can give much higher returns."
The point is supported by Sega, which provides many of those games. "Tournaments will work," said Sega Europe’s Justin Burke. "We reckon that they can earn as much as one-third more by running tournaments."
He pointed to the company’s excellent multi-player World Club Championship Football (WCCF) game, a major piece which thrived on competition between players championing their own football clubs on-screen. "We ran a tournament using the game in the UK a few years back and income was uplifted by a third during that period."
Sega is not the only company producing games using more recent technology than the originators of tournaments - pool, table soccer and darts. In come the touchscreen game providers, companies like TAB, Funworld and AMI Entertainment, all of which run tournaments on behalf of operators.
Funworld told us that its Photo Play Master has been going for over 10 years and is played in 46 countries, with 15,000 tournaments in that time and 450 million games. The company runs three different types of tournaments, its Global Masters with its 50 competitions, the Multiplayer Cup, a 28-day tournament and the Masters Pro series, which takes a year.
"The key to running tournaments successfully is to fascinate players as much as possible so that they come back over and over again and become loyal," said Funworld senior product manager Christian Birmminger. A tournament works best when it binds layers for a long term and builds up friendships and communities among them. If tournaments work optimally, operators can even double the revenue through them."
Another key element in spreading tournaments worldwide is the absence of violence, gambling and pornography among most competitions.
The company reckons the best tournament games are Shanghai, Fun Towers and Solitar, which Funworld says attract players between 25 and 45 years of age. They offer a web-based management tool named funservice to assist operators to set up tournaments with minimal effort.
"We have one Austrian operator who organises a Christmas Cup during the holidays. He selects the favourite games of his players and creates special promotions for his terminals. The winners receive a cup and certificate and are announced at a ‘local heroes function’ on the terminals. The benefit to the operator is the building up of a community spirit among his players and a strong boost to his revenues," said Birmminger.
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AMI has been running its Megatouch Tournamaxx system since 2001. Offered in several countries including the US, UK, Australia, Dubai and more recently Japan it offers multi-level competition. For Vipul Patel, MegaNet sales manager, Tournamaxx works best when promotions are properly executed. "Operators often create posters featuring the game name and tournament information," said Patel.
"Good prizes are also key to a tournament’s success. Machines that are connected and running tournaments usually see a 35 to 40 per cent increase in revenue."
Japanese games maker Konami reports that e-Amusement represents the future of tournaments in the amusement industry. Already proven in Japan, e-Amusement connects players and machines online. The result is that players gain a multitude of features that were previously unavailable and operators get repeat play.
An e-Amusement pass is used by the players - it is a type of card - and this allows them to play head-to-head against friends in different locations. They can also save their play data on a server and at the same time the internet connection permits the machines to be updated with content, or new bonus levels or seasonal themes or whatever the operator desires.
In tournament mode, e-Amusement has provided one of the cornerstones of Japanese arcades. The system is set up for tournaments, local, regional, national or just between two sites. Bringing that system to Europe or to North America would have undoubted benefits to operators.
While Japan may lead in video game tournaments, Europe and North America set the trends for competitions in sports games. And Europe still has areas of unique dominance.
Gambling sites offer tournaments on a regular basis on both sides of the Atlantic, but it is now stretching its influence into pubs and bars too.
Scientific Games, the US-based gambling software provider, has conducted much research into this area and the fruits are now being seen. Christine Jinks, director ?of marketing at Scientific Games subsidiaries The Global Draw and Games Media, reports that bookmaking shops and pub operators are now using promotions, competitions and tournaments with beneficial results.
"Machines in any betting or gaming venue won’t promote themselves; maximising machine income requires continued effort in order to make it an integral part of the outlet’s overall income."
Some careful preparations are necessary to ensure that venue staff fully understand what is happening and why, followed up by promotional displays. Tournaments can provide ‘theatre’ in a venue, says Jinks, and that in turn will help to bring in the non-core players as well as regular machine users.
"Tournaments are the most direct way of getting players to experience machines by touching and feeling the various games. While subtle marketing has its place in the promotion of machines and game content, tournament activity cuts straight to the chase by inviting players to get involved."
Tournaments on gambling machines? They have been run for years in casinos, but bringing them to street operations is a much more recent phenomenon. "Reel-based games work well because they are relatively straight-forward to play and the operator can easily log which players have banked the highest scores, but roulette is another popular choice."
Jinks adds: "Feedback from our customers definitely supports tournaments, having attracted new players. Some have even commented that the promotional activity helped to pull in players from their competitors who they have since been able to retain."
Again, Games Media and The Global Draw provide the point of sale materials to assist promotions, all of which are re-usable.
And it may be that the conclusions centre very much around three basic points: 1, making sure that operators are fully aware of what tournaments can do; 2, taking the hard work out of organising tournaments; and 3, firing up the operator with that essential catch-phrase, "promotion, promotion, promotion."
