What are the benefits? Just as the Website can be automatically altered in an instant for all its viewers – or customised for a single user – so SBG allows for the games available on each cabinet to be changed at any time. That’s useful not only for upgrades but also to fine-tune the mix of games and denominations to suit changing customer demographics on different days or at different times.

With all the intelligence residing on the server rather than in the cabinet, SBG provides powerful opportunities for customising the gaming experience. For example, a player can leave one cabinet, move to another, insert a card that identifies them, and find that it knows all their gaming preferences. They could even spread the same gaming session over several machines.

For example, in the case of WMS and its Lord of the Rings slot machines, players can enjoy the game’s relatively linear form, journey with the Fellowship and unlock various bonus games, then leave the slot, taking their loyalty card with them…but when they return a month later, they can pick the game up right where they left off.

SBG lets players compete with others in the same casino or over a wider area, and facilitates progressive jackpots that involve everyone. It allows customers to play more than one game simultaneously if they wish – a practice that’s popular with younger gamblers, already familiar with juggling multiple digital devices.

And it potentially lets the same game be distributed through several channels: not just cabinets, but handheld devices, phones, and Websites too (always, of course, providing the regulators approve). For example, a recent pact linking BetStone with Microgaming and Spin3 will allow operators to run land-based, online and mobile games on the same platform. The buzzword is “multichannel”, and it is a plus not only for operators but for game developers too – more ways for people to play usually equates to more plays and more profits for all involved.

As Peter Cercone of Playtech explains: “It’s still all about player acquisition and player retention. If you have a land-based operation, why would you be happy to lose your hard-acquired players? This is one of the main drivers for the ‘coming together’ of online and offline gaming. Playtech as a group has been preparing for a long time both the architecture and the product to allow the operator to have a single solution gaming system.

“There’s no point going to a company and saying ‘Here’s your land-based offering, here’s your online, and here’s your bingo or poker offering’, then getting the systems to talk to each other. Playtech’s vision of where technology sits is that technology must be an enabler at architecture level to really offer a back end that is seamless for all the products the company offers. For example, the same back end you use for managing poker online is the exact same product you use for managing the bingo product online. And the same back end that a slot operator would also use in a land-based venue.”

From a management point of view, the centralisation of SBG also improves monitoring, security and recording.

Some people also classify downloadable games as a form of SBG. In this case, the game software is sent from the server to the individual gaming machine, and runs there. Although this does bring some of the benefits of the fully-fledged SBG approach, it’s not true SBG: it’s really just a slicker means of distributing games without having to physically upgrade each cabinet. It doesn’t permit most of the enhancements to gameplay and management that true SBG makes possible.

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