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Michael Starzynski, CEOWhat is the new Bluberi About?
Founded in 1994, Bluberi is a Canadian company specialized in the conceptualization and design of casino games & cabinets. We have established ourselves in the casino gaming industry as a supplier of slot machines and innovative new games, developing high-performance products paired with exceptional customer service. Bluberi’s game content has evolved with current consumers’ tastes and features vivid animation to create fun and immersive worlds for players to enjoy. Bluberi is one of a few companies that offer its games in Class III, Class II, and TLS (Washington) formats.
There is tremendous energy at Bluberi around its latest “Gaming Built Around You” campaign, can you help us understand this new concept in the gaming industry?
Bluberi’s innovative games, cabinets, and purchase options exhibit the company’s commitment to design solutions built around casino operator and player needs, a mantra brought to life in the company’s new ‘Gaming Built Around You’ campaign. We have spent and continue to spend an incredible amount of time with our clients understanding their casino floors, gaming strategies, economic models, financing, and their customers’ demographics to deliver a supreme gaming experience that feels “personal”. Bluberi’s newest slot cabinet the Novus b27 and b49 were developed from the ground up with focus on trialing different ergonomic designs to give our customers the ability to choose the design, features and the look that would best suit their casino floors.
A good example of “Gaming Built Around You”! occurred during a visit to our Washington state customers in late 2017. We approached the casino owners and noticed that they were looking for different branded themes to attract gamers. We explored common themes and areas of interest that could be fashioned into a slot machine’s game. One of the themes that resonated with our customers was Grammy recording artist, Sir Mix-A-Lot, who resides in Washington State and had quite a social media following. Incorporating his personality, his music, show videos, and his brand, we built a game around Sir Mix-A-Lot and launched it at Global Gaming Expo (G2E) 2018 in Las Vegas. When we introduced him at the show, not only did customers from Washington express their resounding interest, but customers from other states flagged the game as a “must” in their casinos in NY, Florida, California, Alabama, and even Oklahoma. The influence of celebrities such as Sir Mix-A-Lot is tremendous, building strong player affinity driving players to these machines anywhere in the casino.
We also spent a lot of time thinking about how to stage the game on the casino floor. The cabinet bank structure is just as important to the success of the game as the game itself. We concluded that a carousel of 4 would generate the maximum interest allowing the player to experience privacy at the game and to experience the full effect of the winning videos and sound bites that people have come to love. “I Like Big Bucks” is the title of the game and it starts its journey across our customer’s casinos Mar 2019 in some key locations. We are already lining up the next series of premium branded games.
Tell us about the futuristic display and player experience loaded into your new Novus Series cabinets.
We have spent quite a few cycles understanding the challenges casino operators face on the gaming floor and what type of game content makes sense and where! And to ensure that our new product lines meet and exceed what our customers want and need on their floors
One of our thrusts for 2019 is to launch our Novus Series slot cabinets, built with an innovative and modern common component design. The b27 and b49 cabinets provide a sleeker approach to cabinet design. These cabinets are built from ground-up based on surveys and trials carried on throughout our customer base from California to Florida, Washington to Alabama. We have gathered feedback and incorporated 300+ enhancements into the Novus product from our original design in late 2017. The cabinet options include multiple display modules designed with industry-leading Bluberi stability and player-centric ergonomics for the best possible player experience. Privacy for players is a must, so the Novus comes with a number of privacy separators and twin USB charging ports. The gaming experience has engaging LEDs to accentuate the wins, visceral sound effects, and immersive graphics in every game, making for a totally different gaming experience. For the casino floor maintenance staff, the Novus boasts easy installation and maintenance with comfortable, secure access to cash boxes, and print refills all at waist height, no need to crawl on the floor to maintain the cabinet. The Novus cabinets display modules, whether the dual 27 HD screens of the b27 or the premium 4k experience of the b49, provide visual and auditory relief to the players allowing them to enjoy the game experience for as long as they want. The b27 and b49 also features a common base with the capacity of supporting the current b27 and b49 display formats, as well as 4 future display modules for maximum operator flexibility. At the core of the Novus Series cabinets is the new Spider Game Board which enhances the game design with 4K graphics and state-of-the-art expandability, ready for the current game needs as well as future game designs.
What keeps you ahead of the pack in the casino solutions arena?
One important factor underpinning the games is the technology used. The casino management teams ask for game rendering capability that can support sustainability day-in-day-out and can survive on their ever-changing floors. In the past, we used standard game-boards circa 2012; our new tech is state-of-the-art. We now leverage the newer much more sophisticated Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) from AMD. With integrated graphics on board where we can push the boundary of game development leveraging ultra-rich graphics and H.264 video decoding for smooth video and graphics display—a much-required capability when rendering 3D. As the need for richer games makes its way into the casino, we are moving all our products to 64-bit addressability to access every aspect of our powerful 4k and 1080 HD screens. As if that’s not enough we have extended our existing platform into a sophisticated Unity framework that allows us to tap into powerful 3rd party rending technology which would take forever to deliver without our Unity framework. Our games integrate seamlessly with any casino back office for player tracking and SAS reporting. Harnessing all this power allows Bluberi to provide cross-class game dynamics from class II to class III, and TLS jurisdictions. Unlike some of our competitors, we supply all the three gaming classes making it easy for our clients when deploying the game in whichever operation mode they would like to run.
What does the future have in store for Bluberi?
Bluberi will continue to focus on enhancing hyper-local game and theme content and provide enticing games pushing “Gaming Built Around You”! to the next level. With the introduction of the ultra-modern Novus gaming equipment, our customers get the best of all worlds, great cabinets, great hyperlocal content, engaging games and a choice of what form of the game they want to run (class II/III/TLS). In 2019, our focus will be California growth and expansion, in parallel with Washington, Florida, Oklahoma, Alabama, and New York. We are planning a double-barreled product line in all these territories with Sir Mix-A-Lot and the Novus series of cabinets. We also look forward to signing new branded themes within the next few months to ensure a constant flow of engaging branded content on the back of our innovative new game platform.
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