Summit Gaming: a Montana success story
Pub Date: 10/1/2006
Summit Gaming, a Billings based video gaming machine designer and manufacturer, has been angling to be Montana's market leader for over 10 years since its inception in 1996. Just a couple of months ago Summit attained that pinnacle, now with more gaming machines operating in the Montana market than any other single manufacturer.
If you've got a mountain like that to climb, you want a driven leader like Tim Carson at the head of your expedition.
But Carson may now be shepherding the 50-employee company toward an entirely new series of peaks to scale. It was announced Aug. 30 that Summit Gaming and GameTech international, Inc., a Reno, Nev., producer of electronic bingo devices, were joining forces to create and tap what would appear to be substantial potential synergies.
Summit was spawned as the small video gaming machine division of Texas based Dynamo, Ltd., a manufacturer of amusement devices, perhaps most notably air-hockey and pool tables.
The division was spun off as a separate company under Carson's tutelage in 1996 and relocated to new quarters in Billings. In the early going, it was Carson and just three other employees. That's a far cry from the $35 million, 50-empolyee market leader it has become today, just 10 years later.
The company now produces highly innovative video gaming machines for Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, Louisiana and numerous Native American gaming venues.
Carson has always sited the relatively small size of his company, and its heavy emphasis on expansive in-house research and development capabilities, as giving it the market nimbleness of a P-T boat in a sea of aircraft carriers.
Indeed, Summit was the first to roll-out multi-game programming and chip sets when new rules allowed it in Montana late in 2004. And because the basic Summit game architecture has been designed to accept almost unlimited upgrades, nearly the whole line was rapidly converted to multi-game standards within months, an almost stunning feat.
Equally as surprising has been SummIt's grab of market share. It now fields over 5,600 units, almost one third of the machines in operation in the state. More impressively, it has done so in the face of a stagnant market. State operators have been running about 17,000 machines for years, so a Summit machine is almost always sold as a replacement for existing equipment, not to fill an expanding demand.
It has done so also in the face of increasing competitive pressures from three new manufacturers in the marketplace as well as gaming powerhouse IGT.
Just this year the company saw another in a series of expansions. Over time, it has occupied more and more of the space in its original building on Overland Ave. in Billings. Last year Summit was forced to expand into another 9,600 square-feet building across the street and now occupies 32,000 square-feet for It's business offices, marketing, research and development and manufacturing requirements.
Summit has been successful, Carson says, by staying focused on core markets and core principles, such as the drive to always enhance the entertainment a player receives for the coins dropped in. This has been accomplished through innovative game concepts such as bonus play screens and the acclaimed MegaPlex series, but also through attention to game/player interaction, animation, graphic and audio quality and player ergonomics.
Summit games are consistently among the industry's top daily earners because, Carson said, Summit has always kept operator profitability at the forefront, along with player entertainment.
"Anyone can build a game popular with players," Carson said. "The trick is to build one that players will play, but will retain a decent income for the operator, too."
Source: The Montana Tavern Times, Oct., 2006, published monthly by Continental Communications, 125 W. Granite St., Suite 102, Butte, MT 59701.