One might ask, following the EAG expo, whence now Category C? The UK market for pub machines of the Category C type (AWPs for non-UK readers), is jammed between a rock and a hard place.
We have the manufacturing majors making digital games, but digital games generally still don’t earn as well as analogue. So there are a number of smaller manufacturers now happily walking through the newly opened door and flourishing while they make analogue.
We have what has become known as Donglegate, a new technological advance by Bell-Fruit which will add a sizeable premium to the cost of new games, but which will push more of the proceeds of operation back into the coffers of the development teams – and, by definition, leave less for the retailer.
Then you have the retailers who refuse to see the logic of a resulting £20 per week uplift in income in return for an extra £10 a week rent (illustrative figures). They’ve approved the games, but refuse to pay the extra. Then you have the operators with nowhere to go; their margins would be non-existent if they absorbed the extra cost of the dongle.
For Bell-Fruit – now alongside its main competitor, Astra, as a Novomatic-owned company – there’s no going back. They still firmly believe in the principle behind the dongle (and so do I, for what it’s worth). Anyway, a cynic might argue they also now have the largest operator in Novomatic’s control, Gamestech, so there’s a ready conduit for their dongle games. I heard that argument a few times on the EAG floor, but it doesn’t hold too much water; even an in-house operator has to make a profit.
The pressure for analogue comes from the fact, already discussed, that they still make the best returns. The Independent Operators’ Association, while a collection of smaller operators, remains, as a co-operative, very powerful. And the IOA wants analogue because many of its members cannot absorb the costs of the dongle. There remain about 100,000 of Britain’s 120,000 pub Category C machines still on analogue technology.
Biggest sector, most popular sector and to hell with the fact that it is outdated technology! But that’s not the way forward. Digital is without doubt the future and the dongle will put more of the wherewithal to progress that technology back where it needs to be, in the R&D departments – then eventually, all will benefit.
But the retailers, it seems, don’t want to know and refuse to do it whatever the logic, and the operators don’t know what to do for the best. What they are all terrified of is the possibility that, with the main manufacturers and a large slice of the operating business now in Austrian hands, will the “German system” be forced upon them? It worked for Novomatic in Germany and ostensibly, there’s no reason to suppose it won’t work in Britain.
People, however, are always afraid of change. There may be good reason to be afraid, but we need to see better digital games and a more commercial (as opposed to greedy) attitude from the retailers, before we can find out.
