How EKG Data Helps Casinos Choose Top-Performing Games

...about your company or reference you guys. They're like, who's that? And I'm like, oh, it's the people. They're all over LinkedIn. Like, it's not their content, but their little logo is all over LinkedIn. Everyone's very proud. The suppliers, they love to have their games and their cabinets and all of that called out on your charts. And then the operators also like to see that too. Yeah, so EKG, short for Eilers and Kraycheck. So if you've ever seen that on LinkedIn and tried to figure out how that was pronounced, that's how you pronounce it. Pretty tough. I love that they put them back-to-back too. they're like we're also gonna yeah we're gonna layer that and um yeah in short uh we're a market research firm focused on gaming so i'm the director of the game performance database it's the world's largest repository of game performance we track 650 000 machines globally it started off in 2018 todd eilers and rick eckert the managing director we're looking for a way to sort of formalize surveying vendor performance and had some operator buy-in started off with probably 30 40 000 machines in 2018 very u.s focused and since then we've really expanded the scope across the u.s across different markets class 2 canada and then now we've expanded our game performance database into europe eastern europe latin america our goal has always been to sort of standardize game performance and sort of serve as sort of an objective third party as to what games are performing, what are players drawn to, what kind of mechanics are resonating with players. So yeah, as you said, you probably see a lot of our research fly out there and we work really closely with operators and vendors alike in collecting that game performance. We standardize it each month. Each month we put out what I would say is our bread and butter report, our game performance report. and that's a it's it's basically a report that just sort of stacks up all the different games we're seeing right now both new and overall and we're scoring them and trying to understand what's resonating with players and just sort of moving the industry forward and this for operators is probably like a godsend yeah you first started pitching this to operators where they're like yes please we would actually love that well now there's like hundreds of games coming out each year right and you you don't have a budget or a floor space for 100 games and how do you sort of sift through um which game should i purchase because you're also dealing with vendors who are telling you anecdotes about performance so i think we're coming in there we're arming operators with a little bit more data to go um you know i want x amount of these or i don't want that or more of that i see that's working and i don't have it why don't i have that so i think we're helping bring some some more tools um to optimizing your floor sort of use it as a shopper like a buyer's catalog too like hey i saw that at G2E or i saw that at IGA how's it performing now do i want to invest in that so yeah i think it's a pretty nice tool to have what's also great about it is it's complimentary for operators so how the value exchange works is um operators send us a snapshot of monthly performance we don't ask for anything too intrusive we're looking for a list of games and some some performance ratios nothing really sensitive such as wins or actuals or things like that so in an exchange you get not just the game report but reports on cabinet performance ETGs mechanics um general market trends just just a lot of different things that i think if you're if you're operating just things you should be privy to and so it's a pretty good value of exchange and a good uh suite of tools for to have for the operators what's like the most common question you get asked from suppliers and from operators i think they're just really interested in knowing how how can i use this report to for vendors how can i use this report to help improve my product roadmap make better games make games that players want to play and for operators they're not as you know they're not necessarily they don't need to know the nuts and bolts and the ins and outs of the games what kind i need to deliver a product that my players um want to have and it's it's kind of like a buyer's catalog for okay i need to go get this so i think um definitely working with both of them on how they can use the reports to sort of improve their strategy um helping vendors understand what products are working or what kind of mechanics or trends are working and delivering it that in a way that's digestible And same with operators, too. How can we deliver a product that, you know, you're the operators are dealing with a million things a day and a million different reports. So how can we deliver something in a way that's super digestible and, hey, go get this or, hey, this is doing really well and you don't have it. So I think that's what we've been trying to do and just trying to deliver that efficiently and effectively. Do you ever get negative feedback about? yeah sometimes games sometimes games don't don't do as well as i think they might have but i would say um on net i think the feedback is mainly positive i mean you spend so i mean vendors spend so much time on a game they spend upwards of they spend one to two years on a game and i i'm sure it's um i'm sure it's a really nice feeling to see a game come in on you know these top 25s and then on the other hand it probably is a little bit of a bummer if you spend you know all this time on a game and it doesn't hit the list and that is the nature of the business unfortunately too is there just so many games that come out and um but you know the cream rises to the top though so