Today we are taking another look at the results of land-based deals which went down at the ICE Totally Gaming exposition, where plenty of partnerships and orders were made between different companies involved in both the online and land-based gambling sectors. While online industry participants such as Begado also had representatives at the event, some of them with their own stands, it was perhaps much more important for the land-based industry companies to put their wares on display, as there is no other way for their potential customers to decide whether or not they want to purchase the machines other than actually going down and seeing how they work.
Something that we do not always take into account is the fact that there are plenty of other areas within the casino industry that we probably think about. Of course we see the slot machine games and the tables which are getting increasingly more technology advanced, and we see the obvious employees such as the croupiers and the waitresses. When we get onto the people who are behind the scenes perhaps it becomes a little less obvious, and even more so with the things which are in plain view at all times and yet seem to slip our minds. How would a land-based casino be able to operate at all if it did not have cash machines available on site? The German cash machine specialists Hess are actually leading their industry in innovation at the moment, and they had a brand-new product on display at ICE in order to show land-based casino operators the new technology which they could be installing on their casino floors next to the cashier windows in order to allow people to take money out of their bank accounts before trading it in for chips.
The Scorpion 413 is a smaller and cheaper version of the current Scorpion range, which has specifically been designed for arcades and casinos where it is important to have the cash machines taking up as little space as possible. The unit facilitates both smartcards and TITO and is therefore very advanced, and it is even very competitively priced for a German-made product. “We have currently got it on trial in arcades in Spain,” said Erik de Kat of Hess. “And the next markets we will introduce it to are the UK and Ireland, with the Netherlands to follow.” This is an area of the industry which is quite interesting, even though many people do not think about it at all. As for the exposition itself, De Kat was not very happy with the first-day attendance at the show, which he thought was a little bit less than it had been in previous years. He was however pleased with the stand which they were able to pertain, which they shared with a couple of partner companies from the Netherlands. “This is the best spot we have ever had at ICE,” he said. “It is open on all four sides, which is a great advantage as far as we are concerned.”