We received a number of comments from players who read our article on some reasons why casinos would remove older slots from their gaming floors. A lot of the player thinking was around the difference between owned and leased slots. Let’s tackle a few of those comments.
Don’t they own their older slots and pay rent on the newer ones?
Erin G.
The age of the machine is less of a consideration than whether a game was designed to be owned or leased. Older slots still on the casino floor are far more likely to be owned by the nature of the fact that any leased games of that age would probably be gone.
But that doesn’t mean all newer games are leased. Game makers offer both owned game options and leased game options as a part of their line-ups.
There has been a shift over time to a higher percentage of leased games on the floor, helped by game series like Lightning Link and Ultimate Fire Link, whose series have had remarkable staying power a decade after being introduced. But there are still games released for ownership to this day, and casinos will generally budget for a mix of owned and leased options.
I had a meeting with the operations manager at my local about them bringing back more popular new games that they had removed from the gaming floor, but they keep the older games even though they are rarely played. The reason why they don’t remove the older games and bring in new ones I was told is because the new games are all leased through the companies, where as the older games the casino owns. So even if they are never used they don’t have to pay monthly leasing fees and they collect 100% profits from those games. Plus I was also told they were only allowed a certain number of leased machines per site/district.
Owned games continue to occupy a percentage of casino floors because once they’re owned, with the exception of upkeep and the electric bill, there isn’t all that much cost there. The limit on leasing may be in Brian’s case because he’s in Canada and the government regulations there can be more strict, but even casinos in the U.S. will generally have a budget for leased machines (which also could be the case for Brian’s casino, just to be clear).
While casinos have been loosening their budgets for more leased machines (aided in part by the fact that a good number of leased options have strong performance that can aid a casino’s bottom line), it still makes up a smaller percentage of their floors as a total, so much of what’s there is owned.
But newer machines with old games can often be rotated more quickly because at the end of the day, if a shiny new slot is not getting played because players aren’t pulled in enough to generate the play expected by having a newer machine, it’ll get rotated with a different purchased game with the hopes of boosting performance.
So even with owned machines performance matters to some degree, but once a machine is old enough and new games aren’t coming out for it, it’s more likely to stick with the game that’s on there that was doing well before until such time as the slot hardware is swapped out for something newer.
