“Following is a letter from our Founder and CEO, Laurence Escalante, that outlines the vision of Virtual Gaming Worlds”
Thank you for the opportunity to introduce you to Virtual Gaming Worlds.
VGW was founded with extremely ambitious and disruptive goals at its core, and I am proud to share them with you today.
We are here to disrupt two giant, growing markets: the $100 billion global gaming market and the $385 billion global gambling market. We create products that operate in a new “convergent” space that effectively combines the innovations and mass audience appeal of gaming with real money gambling.
These markets have historically been distinctly separate by virtue of the significant technical and legal challenges that confront game developers who wish to provide licensed online gambling services. Successful online gambling operators of the past decade (based mostly in Europe due to their more progressive stance on the industry) have been built far away from the innovations that take place in the Americas and Asia in the space of online gaming.
The last decade has seen an explosion of innovations in the gaming markets – The rise of Social Games, Virtual Worlds, and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) – very little of which has reached the world of online gambling.
Until now.
VGW has First Mover Advantage in the space of convergent gaming: We will be the first business to use Social Games and other online games as distribution for licensed online gambling play. We will look to effectively convert players into gamblers, whilst simultaneously monetizing the player base through game industry models like microtransactions and virtual goods.
Creating this convergent space is known as a Blue Ocean Strategy; where superior differentiation (through a better play experience) and lower costs (compared to gambling alternatives) are achieved simultaneously. Rather than competing with existing industries, Blue Ocean Strategies look to make competition irrelevant by creating new market spaces.
Our blue ocean is the total, convergent interactive gaming experience, and we will look to exploit this substantial market opportunity as quickly and as effectively as possible.
The potential power of this model, combined with the growing shift towards online gambling activity worldwide, the growing importance of mobile devices, and the general rise and sheer audience reach of free to play gaming models, all points to a convergence of extremely positive indicators for VGW.
As entire generations across the world grow up playing games and demand more engaging, more social and more immersive gambling experiences, VGW will be there to supply this wherever our players may be: on mobile devices, on social networks, on next-generation web delivered consoles and on browsers.
Our goal is to quickly access public markets as a cornerstone of our growth and strategy acquisition strategy; at which point many businesses in the games business may produce tremendous synergies with licensed online gambling play. We will look to make many substantial acquisitions and unlock the immense value of long running games franchises with large audiences by combining these with licensed online gambling.
Our immediate product line consists of the world’s first completely integrated social gaming, virtual world & licensed online gambling platform, complete with 20 integrated minigames with licensed casino play capabilities. We will integrate this platform with leading social networks, using these as cost effective & viral customer acquisition channels whilst not being beholden to any individual network. Rather, we are creating our own “Gambling Social Network”.
An important part of this “Social Gambling” and “Gambling Social Network” strategy is to apply affiliate and Multi-Level Marketing techniques to convergent gambling play. We allow our players to create, promote and monetize their own casinos, game rooms and games to their own social networks, and pay them a percentage of turnover generated in both virtual and real currencies. This model of social gaming affiliates turns an entire large segment of the online gambling industry, Affiliate Marketing, on its head and applies social and crowdsourcing dynamics and efficiencies to gambler acquisition. This naturally results in powerful monetization potential and strong network lock-in effects.
Lastly, the efficiencies enabled by our powerful business model and Blue Ocean strategy allows us to approach social responsibility as a gambling operator in ways that are truly remarkable. We provide a micro-gambling service that allows players to participate in exciting gambling play with much smaller amounts than are possible in most traditional gambling play, maximizing the duration of players’ funds and increasing their enjoyment for their amount spent. We also have the ability to enforce affordability limits, and to require checks and other protection mechanisms once players have reached these and have been identified as being at risk of potential problem gambling behavior.
These truly innovative and socially conscious initiatives ensure that not only are our products differentiated for their superior convergent entertainment capabilities, but as a business we intend to lead the disruption of the broader gambling industry towards a more comprehensive protection regime for players and a more affordable gambling model. Combined, our products will lead markets and regulators in being a truly positive example for social responsibility and challenging any general perceptions of the general gambling industry as one that benefits from vice and destructive play, at the expense of problem gamblers. Disrupting the industry in this manner is a powerful personal driver of mine, having 3 direct family members, including a brother, who are problem gamblers themselves. I continue to bear first hand witness to the utter devastation caused by problem gambling, and wish nothing more than to protect other families from similar experiences, in the pursuit of our broader gaming convergence & disruption strategy.
I thank you once again for the opportunity to present Virtual Gaming Worlds to you.
I believe you will see, from the Board and Team we have assembled, to the innovative product platform we have built, to the globally operational company we have grown, that VGW is truly an exceptional opportunity, at an exceptional time in history.
I invite you to join us on the exciting journey that is Virtual Gaming Worlds.
Sincerely,
Laurence Escalante