In the five years since Australia’s Ainsworth Game Technology opened its North American headquarters in Las Vegas, the supplier has honed its ability to churn out high-earning slots, and has perfected the art of designing one style of game in particular: the high-denomination, traditional-style video slot.
Ainsworth released an array of high-denomination products, ranging from simple volatile three-reel game in nine-line or five-line formats to five-reel offerings that take advantage of today’s most popular game mechanics.
The company’s high-denom games definitely are big earners. A quick glance at Eilers-Fantini’s Game Performance Report for any month will show anywhere between five and 10 Ainsworth high-denom games that are among the top 25 revenue earners. ReelMetrics survey and industry gauges show similar results.
Lower-volatility, low-denomination games, including a few carefully selected brands, have rounded out the company’s product library with offerings that, again, utilize the game features that have proven to be popular with players.
Ainsworth has been working hard to create hardware that best reflects the game content it produces over the last few years. Covid-19’s pandemic, which struck last year, interrupted major hardware rollsouts. A-STAR Curve (a slim cabinet that features a 43-inch floating monitor and dynamic LED lighting) gave Ainsworth game creators a powerful toolkit.
Ainsworth’s A-STAR Curve is in its prime and Ainsworth has launched the A-STAR Curve XL. A massive, new premium cabinet with a large, 4K curved LCD monitor (55 inches), a topper of 27 inches and all the dynamic LED lighting and touch-screen buttons decks that made the A-STAR Curve so special.
This cabinet was introduced for the first time at the Indian Gaming Tradeshow (July) and is intended to be used by the premium player.
“We couldn’t be more excited about the A-STAR Curve XL,” says Mike Trask, Ainsworth’s director of product marketing and strategy. “We’re really trying to reach a true gaming ops premium space with this cabinet. We think the game content has a few of the things that have made Ainsworth very successful over the past five to 10 years.”
The launch series for the A-STAR Curve XL mines the company’s high-denom appeal with a game series called Take It or Leave It, with inaugural games Super Hot 7s Classic and Solid Gold 8s Classic. These three reel, 5- or 9-line, multi-line, seven-symbol games have traditional bar symbols and 7 symbols. They also include multiplying wild symbols such as 2X, 3X, 5X, and 5X. One giant bonus wheel is located at the top of the enormous monitor.
The wheel bonus provides the game’s hook—the player gets up to four wheel spins. The bonus reward award is a wheel that lights up when it spins. You can either take your first result or you may try three times more to get a better outcome. (The game even advises the player when the bonus offer is “hot.”)
You can play the games in multi-denomination packages with an option menu that includes $1, $5, and $10. According to Trask, the top-performing configuration on Ainsworth’s three-reel high-denomination offerings has been a $1 denomination with nine lines, with a max bet of five credits per line—a $45 maximum bet.
“We’re seeing average bets on those come in well above $9; people are really chasing the wheel feature,” he says.
In fact, according to Cody Herrick, Ainsworth’s senior director of game design, the latest statistics show that average bets on games offered in this configuration are around $22—between two and three times the minimum cover cost.
“It’s built for gamblers,” Trask says of Take It or Leave It, which was developed by high-denom master Terry Daly. “There are no free games. There’s no fluff to it. This is a chase for a progressive or a massive win on that wheel.”
The two launch games on the A-STAR Curve XL will be “front and center” at Ainsworth’s G2E booth, Trask says, adding that there are a number of follow-up games for the format that are in the pipeline that will be introduced at the show, including linked, branded versions of some of Ainsworth’s classic high-denom titles.
A-STAR Curve XL will be available in California, Oklahoma, and Nevada by the end of Q4 this year.
