We don’t have an opinion for the simple reason that skill-based slots are still working their way through the regulatory process and haven’t been deployed on Nevada gaming floors yet. When they are, one of the first places you’ll see them is the Downtown Grand, which has aggressively partnered with GameCo to develop skill-based games and made them a high priority of its future marketing plans. GameCo rival Gamblit told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that skill-based slots wouldn’t dominate the casino floor of the future: "We’re just looking for a small space, not the whole floor."
According to Casino Journal this is not a brand-new phenomenon that sprang, full-blown, like Minerva from the head of Zeus: "Slot suppliers have been adding skill-type play to gaming-machine bonus rounds for years; however, development of full-blown skill wagering content was always on the back burner, mostly due to the laws and regulations that maintained slots must remain games of chance." Huntington Press/LVA Publisher, Anthony Curtis, confirms that skill-based bonus rounds have been a feature of slot machines in the past but were "vultured" by advantage players, causing casinos to pull them off the floor.
"However, don’t be surprised in the next few years if slot machines resemble giant smartphones and tablet PCs, or are the sit-down video games that Baby Boomers played a generation ago," wrote the R-J’s Howard Stutz. Of traditional slot machines, Deutsche Bank analyst Andrew Zarnett said, "Younger players dislike them, as they seem primitive to the exciting games that millennials play on their cellphones," like Angry Birds and Slotomania. That’s a $9 billion industry and "even a small fraction of this growing play would likely make land-based gaming operators extremely happy," opines Casino Journal.
Vintage slot games may also be retrofitted with skill-based elements. If you make it to the bonus round on Scientific Games’s Space Invaders Evolution, you get to play a round of traditional Space Invaders. Whether millennials own the patience to wait for a bonus round to hit is a question that remains to be answered. International Game Technology has a TMZ game in which players can have their photo taken and inserted into the TMZ celebrity-search bus. The company is also working on a video slot that would incorporate elements of Texas Hold ’em, capitalizing on the card game’s recent popularity.
The physical nature of the slot game itself may change beyond recognition. Gamblit has displayed a tablet game, Smoothie Blast. "Players match fruit that ends up in a blender. Payouts off the initial wager are determined by the smoothie’s contents," reported the R-J. Then there are tabletop games for multiple players, such as Grab Poker, a Gamblit game in which players scramble to assemble the best hand of ’cards’ on the digital tabletop. Casino versions of Guitar Hero and first-person-shooter games like Call of Duty have also been mooted.
Given that casino slot holds could be adversely affected by games that were entirely skill-based, we expect to see the industry adopt some sort of hybrid technology that keeps the element of chance in play. Nevada and New Jersey regulators, Casino Journal reports, have already moved to "include provision over the percentage of bets collected and prohibit casinos from making the games harder or easier to win while a game is in progress, based on the perceived skill of the player." While skill-based gaming would be legal in 33 states, Nevada and New Jersey are expected to be the first movers, with Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York State soon to follow.
Tomorrow, Part II: What will the first skill-based slots look like?
