Tech upgrade broke the casino – took slots offline for days Australia's Star Entertainment Group, operator of three casinos down under, has seen its slot machines and other electronic games go offline for at least three days after an upgrade went awry. The outfit on Monday advised investors [PDF] that "following planned upgrades to The Star's systems in readiness for the introduction …
More or less. They mostly exited game development around the early 2010s and make their money off producing gambling hardware now. Pretty much any electronic slot machine you'll encounter in a casino these days was manufactured by Konami with the software installed on it being from someone else, though I reckon many of those are the same program with swapped graphics cause you can only do so much to dress up a format like that.
Yeah, I heard they'd pretty much abandoned video gaming in favour of cheap, cash-in milking of the nostalgia associated with their IP by slapping it on pachinko machines and the like.
And while I've no idea what they were like in the past, they do sound like they've been a particularly shitty, dog-in-manger and generally abusive company company to work for in recent years.
“The Star’s world-class portfolio of entertainment, gaming and leisure destinations drives further gaming innovation to market, powered by SYNKROS”
Konami's SYNKROS casino management system is redefining the art of connection in the gaming space
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Technically speaking these are not gambling machines as the central computer decides when to not pay out /s
> The most recent inquiry came to The Register's attention after it discovered a software glitch saw Star's Sydney operations give away AU$3.2 million ($2.05 million) in cash – some of it to suspected criminal figures who learned of the easy-to-exploit method that saw the casino leak lucre.
Are there any more details available of this easy-to-exploit give-away? (Asking for a fiend...)
Many years ago, I was part of the IT exec team at Crown in Melbourne. The slots folks could tell you exactly what the bet rate was at the time an outage hit and would make sure the person responsible knew what the damage was. To be fair, first time was treated as a learning experience, but if you caused two outages they'd be out for blood.
In terms of patron behaviour, you don't need to bring the slots offline to get them to stop paying in. Anything that stops the jackpot counter will have an immediate impact on the spin rate for any machines linked to that pot.
The slots folks could tell you exactly what the bet rate was at the time an outage hit and would make sure the person responsible knew what the damage was. To be fair, first time was treated as a learning experience, but if you caused two outages they'd be out for blood.I can't quite put my finger on it but there's something sickening about that, perhaps it's the entitlement?
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