New GVG games ready
Optimism is requisite to entrepreneurship.
No one gets into business without being willing to face risks, and being optimistic the risks will play out positively and pay off.
Five folks familiar to – and with – the gaming business in Montana eyed some big risks one-and-a-half years ago, weighed the odds, then rolled the dice with huge investments in launching a brand new gaming machine. It was a "Grand Vision" and so the company was named accordingly.
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| Arntzen shows off the new set of Grand Vision games. |
Steve Arntzen, Tim Carson, Merle Frank, Heidi Schmalz and Grant Lincoln brought their more-than-a-century of gaming business experience to the development and launch of the Grand Vision Gaming platform.
All were optimistic they could hit a homerun in this first time at bat. It turned out they hit the ball all right, but it wasn't out of the park. Luckily, they had the clean-up hitter on deck ready to drive the base runner home.
That "clean-up hitter" is a vastly bigger and improved free game suite upgrade that is nearing delivery to owners of the GVG machines, probably in mid-to-late-March after some additional beta testing.
In hindsight, the partners will admit there were plenty of pressures to bring the game to the marketplace quickly, and that they did so in nine months is testimony to their capabilities, drive and determination. But the machine's performance was not up to initial expectations, though players have steadily warmed to it since its introduction last summer.
The Montana Tavern Times visited the Grand Vision Gaming offices in Billings Feb. 11 where Arntzen was eager to walk this reporter though the new product.
"We wanted a new ground-up game built for the future and different from the others," he began. "We got there but missed a little on the games themselves." Looking back, "it needed more (development) time and effort. Only time in the field (now eight months) will identify weaknesses.
"The 'box' works," Arntzen said. "Players like the cabinet and ergonomics but game-play left something to be desired. Now we're spending all our time on game development. "
"We heard the criticism and didn't disagree. We've learned a whole bunch," he says. Arntzen is Chief Operating Officer of Century Gaming, Montana's largest route vendor, and Carson is president of Amusement Services, another large vendor. "We have 300 of these machines on our own routes and no one wants them to be top performers more than we do!"
The new game suite, which features seven poker games (three are "player-hold" versions, three are auto-hold, along with "Hold 'Em" poker) and three new keno games, "is monstrous," Arntzen said. "In fact, Gambling Control has said it was more like a brand new submission than an upgrade, and it is.
"We've rethought it all, even the sounds, for example. Our developers have actually been asked to play the game blindfolded to assure our sounds consistently correspond to some distinct play functions or events. We want players to know what has happened even without having to look at the screen.
"We also wanted to make sure the sounds were always pleasing, regardless if the machine was played at slow or fast speeds.
"We've refined the graphics and even added virtual control buttons to six of the new poker screens" that function just like traditional mechanical ones, he said.
"We reworked the graphics and sound associated with a win sequence, which we also improved. We needed to make a win feel like a win.”
"We changed the cash-out routine, too," Arntzen said. The GVG is the first machine to integrate win ticket thermal printers from the get-go (others are retrofitting) so the familiar chatter of the old impact printers was missing. It turns out casino attendants used that noise as a cue to assist a customer. In addition, the old printers took about 14 seconds to print a ticket, which allowed attendants adequate time to respond.
So the GVG now plays a pleasant cash-out sound and ticket printing has been slowed to mimic traditional impact printing sequences and timing.
The game's initial overall math models made sense, Arntzen said, and field data confirms that. However, the engineers have been refining how win scenarios are spread over the game play and bonus features – "rebalanced."
"We felt – and player behavior confirmed it – that we had too much return (size of payout and frequency) on the big events and not enough in the middle," Arntzen said, so that has been adjusted.
"We used a focus group – 125 people playing the machine for two days – to assure that it will play to our expectations."
He said about 24 of the new game suites have been in service on Indian reservations around the state and very early results suggest game play is about twice that of the first generation.
But Arntzen's enthusiasm comes to full boil when he demonstrates the enhanced original game play and bonus features as well as the totally new games.
He touts new "Vegas-style" player-hold poker games where the machine makes no recommendations of discards. When machines – with their mathematical certainties – recommend to players which cards to hold, for many players too much of the thinking and guessing and fun goes out of the experience, Arntzen says. Instead, the Vegas-style games allow players the excitement and fun of trying to outguess the deck and dealer, with an enhanced pay table return as an additional incentive.
There's a new "Double 21" keno game, which often allows for a 21st ball draw as well as giving the player the ability to double the pay table if the 21st ball selection is chosen correctly. Look for a new classic Keno game with bold, clean graphics and sounds along with a player-friendly pay table. And finally, the new “Every Which Way Keno” features three multi-directional arrow icons to move through up to 12 bonus draws, adding "Bonus Hits" to pay table wins or instant cash bonuses on non-winning draw moves.
One of the most fascinating games is the new "Hold 'Em" poker game, where a player duels with an "opponent" and has several options regarding folding his hand, upping the ante or going "all in." A player can even choose among four graphic representations of opponents.
Arntzen said he expected approval for the games around the end of February followed by a couple of weeks of field testing. Then the new game software will be distributed across the state in the following two or three weeks, he said.
Best of all, the upgrade – or overhaul, if you will – is free to all existing owners of GVG machines.