Here’s PR blurb that just fell across the cyber-transom: Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has signed a multi-product and systems agreement featuring sbX(TM), IGT‘s premier server based gaming solution; the majority floor share of games; plus an entire suite of IGT Advantage® system products. After a competitive bidding process, IGT has been selected to provide its integrated games and systems solution at The Cosmopolitan, making the new resort a full “IGT house.”
This would make the Cosmo the third Strip casino (following Aria and Monte Carlo) to go SBG on us. The Newspaper That Must Not Be Cited has an interesting piece on the quiet infiltration of the marketplace by server-based floors, which is still hampered by understandable mistrust between game manufacturers. (They’re forever at each others’ throats in court, so asking them to play nice in an SBG environment must be like trying to mediate between the Israelis and Palestinians.)
Among the interesting facts revealed are that seven casinos in four states have signed onto IGT’s system and that the leading SBG market is — Who’da thunk it? — Michigan, including two of the three Detroit casinos. Also, Aria’s slot floor is only 50% server-based … quite a different story from what we were told in the runup to CityCenter. Aria’s was to be, we kept hearing, the first all-SBG casino floor on the Strip. It’s one of the boring-est but that may be coincidental, given the incredibly bad and regressive design of the gambling areas. It’s the casino for people who hate casinos.
While we’re on the topic of MGM Mirage, before it moves ahead with this cockamamie “MGM Resorts International” idea, it might want to consider one of the bigger branding fiascoes of recent years. When Hilton Gaming absorbed Caesars Palace and all the other ex-ITT Sheraton casinos (except the Desert Inn), it already had a drenload of brands — for any Farscape watchers out there — including Bally’s, Flamingo, Grand Casinos and of course Hilton. So what did then-CEO Arthur Goldberg do but slap newly coined, equity-free Park Place Entertainment onto the whole kit ‘n kaboodle. That and the company’s tardiness in uniting its brands with a loyalty program made it ripe for conquest by Harrah’s Entertainment. I’m just sayin’.
Fun fact: Counting acquisition ($770 million) and expansion ($800 million-plus) costs, Morgans Hotel Group and its partners have spent over $100 $1 million per room, basically, on the Hard Rock Hotel.
I think maybe that should read “$1 million” per room