Digital assets are proving they can do a lot to help land based operators, but it just takes the right experts to tie everything together. Alphaslot has been helping operators and game providers do just that, and COO Albert Yu joined our Stephanie Tower on the sidelines of G2E Asia @ Manila to discuss how they’re doing it.
Many of the people you might meet at a gaming conference still don’t understand how blockchain can help improve their business. “What can we offer with this new technology in terms of, with blockchain, in terms of digital assets?” Yu asked rhetorically. “A bit like eSports, you have skins and you have characters for players to collect and win and home, and how do we bridge that into a land-based gaming environment? So that is what Alphaslot is trying to do. And for GameSource, I think it is in a similar path, but with a different technology for cloud-based, so you can have more selection of games and then you have more transparency with regulators, for operators to experiment with and see how the player trends are and for regulators to get more information from the player segment in different jurisdictions.”
Thanks to his time touring the gaming conference circuit, Yu has gotten quite adept at talking to stakeholders about how digital assets and blockchain technology can improve their business, while meeting regulations. “Well for blockchain, I think what we are trying to do right now is basically explain as much as possible,” he said. “I understand there’s a lot of concerns out there for blockchain, whether it is legit whether it is trustworthy. I think it will take time, no doubt about that, therefore I’m here at G2E and I’m on all the different gaming conferences to explain the ecosystem that we’re trying to bring to the market and hopefully we’ll get more queries or also questions. We welcome any questions from regulators so that we can further explain what this technology could bring and what the advantages are for our industry, especially land-based segments.”
Assuming regulators understand how blockchain actually suits their purposes quite well, the next step, especially with the localized tastes of Asia, is to make something the players want to play. “I think the most important part is, for land-based industry, is always player driven,” he said. “So I think more and more in different jurisdictions across Asia, mass-market players are the norm. So everybody’s trying to target premium mass and mass market. So I think the players’ preferences are different in different areas, obviously, but then more and more that we see the trend is towards arcade style, mobile style, maybe some skill based, a lot of different things that are targeting more interactive in terms of the gaming. I think that is where we start because that is where the demand is. So if we don’t worry too much about a regulation, we will worry about more on the demand side, what the player wants, not just another slot game, a bigger screen, or a different IP theme, but actually in the core element of the game is completely different to what the markets offering today.”
Tower asked how operators could start to wrap their mind around how blockchain is a natural part of the evolution of gaming. “I think the most important point is for them to understand what is blockchain at the first stage, and whether this technology help in turnover procedures or operations,” he said. “We don’t really need to use a new technology, only what you need is how it caters to your needs for your operation. For your cage, for your operation, for your player data, for your tracking, what we’re trying to point out is what is the advantage of this technology that they could leverage. Different operators might have different opinions; we think this is the future of what they could bring.”
