An increasing number of non-German companies are applying for gaming machine approval through PTB, the official testing organisation.
The head of the Metrological Information Technology department, Professor Dieter Richter, made a presentation to a group of international trade journalists organised as part of the IMA trade show Media Lounge meeting in Düsseldorf on Wednesday.
Richter was put under some pressure by the assembled German and British journalists - InterGame was the only UK-based publication present - to justify the long lead-in time experienced by manufacturers applying for machine approval. This could take up to eight months and was becoming something of a controversy within the German industry.
Richter said that the industry was itself partially responsible because it was perfectly able to test its own machines for compliance before submitting them to PTB. Often games are submitted before they were even fully completed. “Most of the time is waiting time - waiting for manufacturers to make adjustments to their machines so that they conform to the correct specification.”
The professor would not be drawn on the length of the waiting list of machines for testing at any one period, nor would he reveal what percentage of machines going through the system at any one time are from non-German manufacturers.
InterGame made the point that the German Government’s insistence on a monopoly for its own PTB in testing gaming devices was at least partially responsible for the slow processing of machines.
The publication questioned the validity of this practice in face of European Union competition laws, but Professor Richter said that there was no harmonisation of European gaming laws and therefore the monopoly remained valid.
This was contested by InterGame and, when pressed to accept that opening Germany’s borders to other accredited testing houses would ease the passage of gaming machines through the testing procedures, Professor Richter appeared to concede that it would be quicker.
PTB is based at Braunschweig and Berlin and, he said, the organisation had ‘around 10’ people working full time on gaming machine approvals.
