GeoSweep Game is a Dismal Failure
For the past year, the Atlantic Lottery Corporation has been offering its players an online lottery game known as GeoSweep. However, it has not lived up to expectation and as a result is being discontinued.
GeoSweep Game Did Not Reach Potential
The Chief Financial Officer of the Atlantic Lottery Corporation, Patrick
Daigle, has said that the company has already made the decision to remove the
GeoSweep game from the market.
In fact, GeoSweep did not ever pay out the $250,000 jackpot that was offered with the game. This is a sure sign that the game simply was not as popular as was hoped. Daigle said: "The game just hasn't achieved full potential."
The GeoSweep lottery game had seemed like a good investment, with its interesting offering of a geographic location based lottery game. Players picked one of the 2.3 million locations offered via a map of Atlantic Canada. Each Geo or location, could be owned for 30 days at $7.50.
Some provinces opted in for the GeoSweep game, such as Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, while other provinces, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Labrador chose to opt out, rather than contributing millions to invest in the game.
GeoSweep Investment Not in Vain
Daigle said that although the game would no longer be offered in Canada, the investment that was placed is secure because Geonomics, a British company, is in the process of revising the game and plans a United Kingdom launch later in the year. The investment that New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island invested was not only in the GeoSweep game itself, it was rather for an 8.5% equity stake in Geonomics Global Games Ltd.
A little more than a year ago, when GeoSweep was launched in Atlantic Canada, the launch campaign was extensive. It included buses covered with the GeoSweep logo, along with billboards, and TV ads.
When asked about the promotional launch costs, Daigle said: "It's not our practice to release internal business cases and projections." He also held his silence when asked how bad the sales for the GeoSweep game had been in Atlantic Canada, noting "I'm not at liberty to disclose specific functional data."
For those Canadians who may still wish to try their luck at this location based lottery game before it is shut down, there is still a chance to give it a try, with the last GeoSweep draw taking place on July 4th, 2013.
