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December 15, 2006 |
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| IGT hits EZ Pay milestone | |||
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Reno-based International Game Technology
achieved a significant milestone with its EZ Pay® ticket-in/ticket
out gaming solution in late-November. The company announced its
400th installation of the product.
The 1,385-gaming machine installation at the Gold Strike Casino Hotel in Tunica, Miss. brings the total number of EZ Pay® equipped machines around the United States to more than 185,000. That’s roughly 42 percent of the total number of gaming machines in the United States, the company said. “EZ Pay® has clearly revolutionized slot floors across the country, and we welcome the Gold Strike property as the latest casino to realize its benefits to players,” said Steve Morro, president of IGT’s Gaming Division. The EZ Pay® technology combines ticket printers with traditional coin hopper pays to improve a gaming machine’s cashout function for players. Casino operators can program a machine to pay a portion of the payout in coins and the balance as a ticket. The ticket can then be reinserted into an EZ Play™ machine; exchanged for cash at a cashier’s station; cashed by casino floor attendants with wireless validation units; or held by the player and used at a later time. The system can also be programmed to pay out tickets only, using the coin hopper as a backup. The 400th installation comes as IGT is currently working on a number of other cashless initiatives. “We’re in the final phase of development of a smart card-based cashless system which is much like EZ Pay®, but without tickets,” Reed Alewel, vice president of North American system sales told Casino Journal in November. “We decided to use the smart card product first because in international markets, ticketing is not as prevalent. In the United States the smart cards aren’t prevalent. So we developed this smart card cashless on the EZ Pay® backbone that will allow the player to go game to game moving his credits onto the card so that the information will be in the database but also in a chip in the card itself. As soon as that development is done we’re going to move to a magnetic stripe-based product. IGT had a similar product—called Coinless Transit™, and installed at the MotorCity Casino in Detroit and the Crown Casino in Australia—that was not on the EZ Pay® network. “Eventually we will upgrade them to our new mag-stripe card-based cashless system. We decided the future was to be able to get off-the-shelf hardware and products and be able to standardize them,” Alewel said. —Andy Holtmann |
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