September 19th, 2011
Via RateLasVegas, some information about an interesting new company founded by Andrew Pascal, former COO and President of Wynn Las Vegas and Encore, focused on ‘social gaming’. While we have written about the likely socialization and virtualization of gambling in previous posts, this is a company that possibly may be taking it to heart. As the article notes:
“…For a long time I’ve been saying that younger gamblers are pretty bored by slot machines and features like interactions with Facebook, Twitter, etc… seem overdue. Perhaps this is a move in that direction? I’ve met Pascal a few times but to say I know him would be massively overstating. Still, my impression is that he’s a very smart guy and sees the tech blind spot that a lot of these gaming and hospitality companies have.
Meet incuBET
According to the SEC, Pascal, along with former WagerWorks exec Paul Matthews and a third partner, Humam Saknini have raised $5 million for their new venture.
My original thought was that these guys were adding some social elements to existing slot and video-based games – say maybe coming up with new ideas and partnering with an existing device maker like IGT (WagerWorks was sold to IGT and Matthews went on to work there so relationships likely run deep). The sparse incuBET homepage almost makes it sound like they want to inject wagering into ‘casual gaming’, which is the same code phrase used for games on Facebook, the iPhone and iPad.
Could this be a bigger play than originally thought? Obviously, adding betting to Facebook games wouldn’t be legal in the United States under current law… and changing that sounds like a mighty big job… If I was incuBET, I’d at least be thinking about that possibility for the long term, while working under existing law to make slots more appealing to younger gamblers in jurisdictions that allow them.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 19th, 2011 at 10:49 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
