There is no doubt about it, John Acres is inspiring. That’s why CEM picked him as one of our gaming visionaries and as the first-day keynote speaker at our recent event, CasinoFest 9. Hearing him speak calls you to action. He challenges your beliefs in the industry and your practices. But what I think makes him a visionary is that he not just talks the talk; he also walks the walk.
I interviewed Acres at CasinoFest, and left feeling very inspired. Here are my favorite stand-alone quotes from our time together. At first, they may make you frustrated or angry. But give them time. Let them soak in. Agree with Acres or not, he’s got a very valuable point of view, and in the very best interests of the gaming industry, I strongly encourage you to think about each and every quote.
The Best of John Acres
Featuring: Change
… You never design a machine from the inside out; you design it from the outside in. You start with what the user wants then make it happen instead of just grabbing the parts that you like and hoping somebody likes it.
The bigger our bureaucracy and the more reluctant we are to try things, the more compromised our future becomes.
It’s not that the industry isn’t advancing as much as it should be; it’s not advancing at all.
This industry is worth a lot less than it was 10 years ago. And that trend is not reversing without change on our part. We are far smaller than the consumer industry and we’ve got to adapt.
(On his addiction to the gaming industry) It’s like a smoker giving up cigarettes, you get back to it and say I’ll just try one, and then boom you’re back again.
Let’s look at the computer industry. Here’s where you plug in your printer, here’s a USB port, here’s all this compatibility. Let’s create the same compatibility in our games so we don’t have this alphabet soup of different protocols, where nothing connects together. It’s a Tower of Babel kind of thing.
GSA was founded a year before Google. My point to them is, guys, they built this whole industry and they’re doing tens of billions of dollars in business a year and we don’t have two casinos with this protocol. We’re doing something wrong here. We’re not moving fast enough.
I think it’s easy in this industry to be considered progressive, because so many want to do what they’ve always done.
A large percentage of what you try isn’t going to work the first time. You have to re-do it and re-do it.
Somehow there’s a belief that if you put an idea though lots of processes, that idea will be improved and vetted by the time it comes to the end. Realistically, it’s killed.
All the industries that achieved some significant success tend to lose that success because they try to stymie competition and innovation in the name of control.
Tough times bring innovation. Once you lost what you’ve had, your resources diminish, but your fear of loss also diminishes and you’re open to new ideas.
The problem is that, to a great extent, people perceive mistakes as bad things. Mistakes mean mis-takes. You can’t get a good take unless you have some less than perfect ones. You’re going to try it and learn something and try it again. I’m not saying that every casino should rip apart its entire floor and make it one big experiment, but they can dedicate a percentage of their budget and their floor to trying out innovative ideas and nurturing them so they can eventually become important elements of the full casino.
All of the creativity, all the brains, all the energy is going to this Internet thing. Internet is an awful term because it infers technology, but it’s really this whole opportunity for communication at low cost that is absolutely wide open. It’s the freest market we’ve ever seen. … We need the equivalent of an app store to design our games.
I like knowing that I’ve helped change things. I get a kick out of walking around, seeing player tracking in machines and thinking about the times when people said it’s a lousy idea and won’t work. They said the same thing about progressives, they said the same thing about bonuses, and many of them are saying the same thing about what we’re doing now.
I get a big kick out of thinking about a problem, trying to come up with a solution and then having the will to stick with it till it’s delivered, live through its mistakes, its re-takes, till we get it right.
I like bringing change, I like bringing innovation, and I love it when I see people start their own little companies.
When I look at gaming, I don’t see it being this sinful industry that causes harm. I see it as a microcosm of life. Life is going to give us a lot of ups and downs, like gambling does. For a lot of people, gambling provides hope. I think that’s an essential itch that must be scratched. If we look back at the history of humanity, gambling has always been a part of it. True, it does cause problems, but we have the technology now to control those things. We can provide that outlet. We are every bit as essential to society as movies or music or any other form of entertainment.
Sitting on what you’ve done is a guaranteed way to fail. As long as we do that, we retard our ability to succeed.
I think that our industry’s biggest challenge is that we think that because lots of people come to our casinos that we’re nailing that consumer desire. What we’ve got to realize is that 95 percent don’t come in at all. There’s a far greater market that does not like what we’re selling, and understandably. Casino managers go down and talk to their best players to find out what they want. But if they continue to do that only, they cater to an ever-narrowing field of view. Players that are aging and dying away without any appeal to the new. Our statistics show that’s happening, but we’re ignoring it.
The biggest challenge for us today is to convince people that things are not going to be OK when the recession ends. Supply continues to increase and demand continues to decrease. That’s our problem. The recession just diminished demand abruptly. But unlike a rational market where when demand diminishes, you stop increasing supply, we’ve just kept increasing supply all the way through the recession.
I think the mark of a successful life is the joy of getting up in the morning and that you go to bed because you’re tired.
… I’m not out here to say what people want to hear. I’m out here to cause trouble. That’s fun for me. I don’t want to just nod my head; I want to challenge people to re-think. And that means I better be re-thinking myself, or the message doesn’t come across.
What do you think about these statements? Please weigh in with your comments below.
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