The industry’s top five slot manufacturers staged a rare public preview of yet-to-be-released games last month for players at Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino.
Around 540 players were invited to the casino’s second-floor ballroom, where machines from IGT, Bally, Aristocrat, WMS and Konami Gaming were set up for play. Representatives of the slot-makers were on hand to gather feedback on the new games from players on just-released games like Aristocrat’s Rolling Stones and Bally’s Titanic, and soon-to-be-released games like IGT’s Jenga.
“We like to hear feedback,” Patty Crescenzo, manager of corporate gaming for Aristocrat, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Pete Wichterman, Eastern regional sales representative for Bally, told the newspaper the slot-maker uses public focus groups like this to improve games before general release. “We’ll add more bonus features, take some away, tweak some—it’s all based on customer feedback,” he said.
