The UK’s largest distributor of Category C machines, Crown Direct, is to enter the field of manufacturing.
Managing director Dean Harding told InterGame today that the company will show its first frontline Category C gaming machine at the EAG Expo next week.
The company, he said, was responding to the major strategic and technological changes in the manufacturing business in the UK. “We have been inundated with calls from machine operators asking us to source for them spinning-reel analogue machines.”
The result is that Crown Leisure Games has been set up by the company with the intention, as Harding put it, of going “head to head with the big names in Category C machine manufacturing.”
The machines are being built at the Telford factory of Jem Simmonds’ Gemini Games, using Barcrest MPU6 technology.
“We signed a contract with Barcrest in December, which enables us to utilise its technology for our games. We have a team of our own games designers working on new games, the first of which will be Aztec Treasure and it will be on our booth next week at ExCel.”
Crown has a 30-year working relationship with Barcrest, said Harding, which laid the foundation of the new arrangement. He said that the arrival of digital games into the UK market and the merging of the leading machine makers under the umbrella of one supplier had led to the creation of a major demand for the analogue technology. Harding noted that “perhaps 90 per cent” of the established base of Category C machines currently in the UK market, are analogue. This would mean the bulk of perhaps 100,000 machines.
The demand, he said, was led by many of the independent operators, with the IOA and also with the major operating companies.
“The demand is across the board. We are in a position to satisfy that demand. These are not going to be rebuilt machines – they will be frontline machines for top-level sites.”
