Starlink

About Starlink

On 4 September, Chief Justice John Roberts denied Station’s emergency request for a stay of a federal appeals court decision that ordered the company’s Red Rock Casino Resort Spa in Summerlin to comply with a National Labor Relations Board mandate and bargain in good faith with the union following a failed labour vote in late 2019. Roberts gave no explanation for the denial.

The NLRB ruled after the election that Red Rock took steps to prevent a fair union vote, and Red Rock sued in response, although the ruling was upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last month. After the court denied a rehearing request on 6 August, it also subsequently denied Station’s request for a stay pending SCOTUS relief on 24 August.

Red Rock may still petition SCOTUS to hear the case, and the court could still choose to do so, but in the meantime the casino must comply with the NLRB ruling. The ruling requires the casino to recognise and bargain with the union upon request, post employee rights notices and other measures.

About Starlink

If free-to-play builds familiarity, Splash Tech’s jackpot engine is intended to provide a common thread across an operator’s offering, even when the games themselves come from dozens of competing studios.

“A jackpot engine is a rare product in that you can brand that engine and it will sit across all of your content,” Wilson says. “As an operator, you might have 50 different game suppliers. On every single game that you’re serving, you can show a branded jackpot.”

That is the gap Splash Tech solves: many operators already have strong game libraries, and some have proprietary content, but they lack a flexible jackpot layer that can sit across the full offering without requiring them to build and operate their own engine.

How to play Starlink

Perhaps casinos in Japan could be more slot-heavy, suggests Leckert. “It’s obvious that, culturally, the Japanese have enjoyed playing these machines. Slots might be more successful in Japan than in Macau or Singapore.”

But Klebanow argues that pachinko engages only one specific demographic of Japan’s spciety. Despite the industry’s scale, the format appeals primarily to young men.

Its noisy and crowded parlours, he notes, do little to attract Japan’s critical demographic of women aged 40 and over. They “do not find pachi facilities comfortable or appealing”.