Fruit Machine Chat

I overheard this question being posed by a woman to her husband as they played on the machine and I was waiting for them to finish.(Almost a refreshing change these days).He replied,'Yes,but it's really hard and takes ages'.This made me think of something that I'd already been considering - I spend a bit of time nowadays thinking about what the SWP industry could do,never used to do that - but perhaps there's a market for a very quick game with a decent prize.I often see people chucking a casual quid or two in the bandit 'just in case';I'm sure the the fruit machine pros will say there's little point in people doing that for themselves,but they're glad that they do.What if there was a quiz machine equivalent? Something along the lines of a pound a play,20 quid jackpot and a maximum of 5 questions to win the jackpot,the number of questions would decrease if no-one won all the way down to 1.How I would prevent people guessing their way overly frequently to the jackpot would be to have up to 10 possible answers for each question - the number of possible answers to decrease or increase depending upon how recently a jackpot had been won.With a suitably large bank of questions,it would also be really difficult for a pro to get anywhere near emptying standard.Also,this is a game that would be cheap to design.I'm convinced it would work.
I've posted the above in the perhaps mistaken belief that someone from the industry reads this forum;they really should,there's been quite a lot of good comments on here about what the SWP industry should do.Anybody is more than welcome to PM me!

I think paradoxically you might get more people to play (present company excepted) if it wasn't possible to win anything on a game.

If you think back to Space Invaders etc. one of the things that kept people playing was trying to do better than their last game and to be on top of the high score table. Now, only a few SWPs have a High Score table but even on them the score isn't objective as the difficulty of the game changes based on whether or not it wants to pay out.

If there wasn't the need to give payouts (or rather restrict them) I think you could make a more enjoyable quiz game. It'd give you the option of letting the player set their preferred difficulty or perhaps pick their "specialist subject" so the game was more entertaining without questions that were stupidly easy or on a subject you know you know nothing about.

Have to disagree with that mendez.

A number of years ago I was given a copy of certain quiz machine games on CD, for use on a PC (naughty naughty). I thought it would be great, but the absence of any cash prize element meant it was so stultifying that I couldn't even be bothered to play for practice. I think the quality of the games in terms of gameplay and question quality would need to be very much higher to hold most players' attentions in the absence of a potential cash prize.

Anyone remember MegaTouch? Rare now, but some pubs do still have them as does Playland in Coalville strangely enough.

Obviously not as popular as games for money, although arguably you could say the MegaTouch games aren't much cop.

Most people who play will make a loss so the cash shouldn't be the main reason they play? Unless I suppose it's down to a psychological thing that they feel good about the 3 quid they've won and forget the 10 quid they spent along the way.

Pub Quizzes do still seem to be popular (comments about cheating in the other thread aside) and I can't imagine with most the prize is the reason people enter.

This probably isn't viable for many reasons (complexity & take-up being the first to spring to mind) but I wonder if you could do a virtual Pub Quiz. "Teams" pay 2 quid or so to enter and get 30 random questions on the quiz machine, including a picture round such as from Instant Quizzes. You wouldn't see your score and the next lot to play get a different 30 questions of equal difficulty. After 20 "teams" have entered a leader-board is produced, the winner (somehow) claims their 20 quid prize and the thing resets and starts again.

It's the chance of winning something that keeps those losing players playing, surely? Just like the reason most gamblers gamble despite losing, or the reason I very occasionally spend a few quid in an AWP.

I think it's primarily the entertainment/satisfaction from playing the game as the prizes for average players are so small and usually end up back in the machine anyway.

I could be wrong though. I think it's a big missed opportunity for the companies that make the games that they don't prompt every 100th player with a brief survey about this kind of thing n return for a free credit.

lol i bet they will look back in 10 years, if it's all over, and realise that taking that big opportunity of they survey thing could've been a game changer!