WMS Gaming - Products, Technology, Business

Products, Technology, Business

WMS Gaming's products have helped to move the industry trend away from generic mechanical slot machines and toward games that incorporate familiar intellectual properties and more creative ways to pay off. For more than a century beginning in the late 1800s, mechanical slot machine reels employed limited themes: card suits, horseshoes, bells and stars, varieties of fruit, black bars and the Liberty Bell. WMS's 1996 video slot machine Reel ‘em In, introduced multi-line and multi-coin secondary bonus pay-outs. Later, the company's licensed themes, beginning with Monopoly, helped to greatly expand its sales and profits.

Some of WMS Gaming's product designs reflect the changing demographics of its industry. Younger players raised on video games often seek more challenging experiences, both physical and mental, than do women age 55 to 65 – the traditional audience for slot machines. Accordingly, some of the company's machines incorporate surround sound, flat-panel display screens and animated, full-color images.

The company also manufactures the G+ series of video reel slots, the Community Gaming family of interconnected slots, as well as mechanical reels, poker games, and video lottery terminals. WMS began to offer online gaming in 2010 to persons over 18 years old in the UK and in 2011 in the US at www.jackpotparty.com. In 2012, WMS partnered with Large Animal Games to incorporate several of WMS's slot machine games into a cruise ship-themed Facebook game application titled "Lucky Cruise". By playing games and enlisting Facebook friends' help, players can accumulate "lucky charms" (instead of money). The game play is similar to playing a slot machine but includes a "light strategy component". WMS hopes that the Facebook application will attract new customers for its games at traditional casinos.

WMS Gaming technologies include:

• Transmissive Reels gaming platform, which employs video animation that is displayed around, over and seemingly interactively with mechanical reels. The technology is based on the CPU-NXT2 operating platform.

• CPU-NXT2 operating platform, which incorporates an Intel Pentium IV class processor, up to 2 gigabytes of random access memory, an ATI 3-D graphics chip-set, and a 40 gigabyte hard disk drive.

• Bluebird2 gaming cabinet, which includes a dual 22-inch wide screen, high-definition displays, Bose speakers, and an illuminated printer and bill acceptor.

Approximately 70% of WMS's revenues are derived from U.S. customers. Its corporate office and manufacturing facilities are in Waukegan, Illinois. It has other development, sales and field services offices across the United States and international development and distribution facilities located in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, India, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain and the United Kingdom.