Flops? Oh yes, there have been many! And expensive ones at that. As we addressed in a previous QoD (6/7/05), some huge early hits with themed slot machines that involved third-party licenses ("Wheel of Fortune" being the runaway success story), gave rise to a stampede of slot manufacturers falling over themselves to buy up licenses for every popular brand that might conceivably translate into a slot game, along with many ideas that, even without benefit of hindsight, were probably just plain dumb.
As an industry insider explained to us, the primary demographic for slot players is middle-aged women, yet in many instances, this well-understood factor seems to have been totally disregarded in the misguided belief that if a brand was successful as a movie, TV show, or even a comic book, it would automatically translate into a successful slot machine. Flops like Rocky, The Hulk, and Big Foot demonstrated the wrong-headedness of this approach, while other more promising themes, like Laverne and Shirley, The Honeymooners, and Three Stooges also failed to cut the mustard for one reason or another.
Themed machines also have another inherent problem, namely that the costs incurred by the manufacturer in buying the rights to a name like Playboy or Sinatra mean that they need to recoup more investment money by having less-attractive pay schedules than games that are outwardly less sexy, but much cheaper to develop and which pay back more to the player. A game has to be extraordinarily compelling in order to keep the customers’ loyalty, once they become aware that the less exotically themed machine next door is paying out a lot more money. Likewise, attempts to put bonus rounds on video poker games have been unsuccessful, as players have been proven unwilling to settle for reduced pay tables in exchange for the possibility of a later bonus.
One slot manager explained to us that the new breed of multi-line multi-coin video slots is very popular in general, but that people seem to tire of the specific themes quickly, much as children soon get bored by a particular video game. Unlike reel machines and video poker, there's a rapid turnover among these machines and they're constantly changing titles (so frequently, in fact, that he was unable to name a single obsolete game that he'd previously carried).
Sometimes a game’s initial unpopularity may simply mean it needs some further game-design tweaking to make it a "winner," so the game makers don’t want to divulge the names of any flops or to share their secrets on what makes a game successful. IGT did cite one example from the past, however, namely the initial introduction of Megabucks as a video slot. Apparently, at that time players were somewhat suspicious of video slot games, reflected in their staying away from Megabucks. However, when the company revamped the game and made it a spinning-reel slot, which was much more familiar to most players, Megabucks did very well and, of course, is still popular — now, even as a video slot.
Technical problems can also spell the kiss of death to a new slot machine. In the case of "Trivial Pursuit" and "Clue," for example, the machines were not initially equipped with TITO technology and the short-sighted manufacturers were unable to license it in time for their launch. Once players discovered the joy of not having to deal with buckets of dirty coins, many didn’t want to return to the old system, leaving machines without ticket technology to languish unplayed.
In the case of Sigma’s Professional Bull Riding slot machine (QoD 6/29/2005), the primary problem was that the machine’s computer technology was incompatible with the interface at some of the casinos where it was installed. The game wasn’t popular enough to merit fixing the glitch, so it quickly disappeared from the floor.
In 2003, a highly-publicized Elizabeth Taylor slot called "Dazzling Diamonds" was launched, which instead of paying out in cash, awarded winners with diamond jewelry. The game itself was relatively popular, but the novelty prize structure proved to be its undoing, as the logistics of managing the supply of jewels was too much of a headache for the casinos, which quickly axed it in favor of games that involved less work for them.
