Echo Entertainment edged out James Packer’s Crown Resorts in July 2015 to win a huge contract that would allow the company to build mega-casino resort in Brisbane, Australia. This mega-casino project that will be located in Queen’s Wharf is expected to have more than 2,000 apartments and 1,000 hotel rooms.

Echo Entertainment had earlier proposed to have around 1,500 slot machines (pokies) but is now expecting to work out a new deal with the government that would allow them to add an additional 1,000 pokies. The mega-casino project has enough floor space to accommodate the additional 1,000 pokies and the Queensland government will most likely approve the new request from Echo Entertainment because each pokie license generates $100,000 in revenue to the state.

The initial plan by Echo Entertainment was to transfer and use the existing machines from the historic Treasury Casino but it appears that the state government’s policy will make it easy for Echo Entertainment to install new ones. The mega-casino project is expected to be completed by 2022.

The new Brisbane casino will look to target high stake gamblers from Macau and will compete with casinos in the Philippines, Vietnam and South Korea who are also looking to take advantage of the Macau casino industry slump. These VIP gamblers spend huge sums of money at the casino and that is one of the reasons why Echo Entertainment wants to make sure that the new Brisbane casino would design world class facilities that would cater to an elite client list.

In a statement, Matt Bekier, Echo Entertainment CEO said “We anticipate a very similar mix to what we have at The Star [and] that implies quite substantial bespoke facilities. We’ve had a good run in VIP the last few years and we don’t see that will abate anytime soon.”