George Zaloom led the discussion of a panel of recruiters at Casual Connect USA 2014. “When I think of recruiters, the job of dentist also comes up,” he said. “I don’t know why it is, but hopefully we will be able to dispel some of these rumors, and maybe you’ll show these guys a little love, and they’ll show you what they can do for you.”
George Zaloom wasn’t always in the gaming industry. The CEO of The Las Vegas Whaling Company, Zaloom started out in Hollywood producing films like Encino Man and Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. He wrote Attack of the Killer Bees, which brought him to beekeeping in his free time. “What fascinates me is the utopian society that the bee’s live within — living and harmony and producing more than they need. We can all learn something from them,” he says.
While both the gaming industry and movie industry are content-driven, Zaloom feels the two are vastly different in how they go about achieving their goals. “The big difference is that movies are made by knee jerk reactions by overpaid Hollywood studio execs who take meetings while getting manicures (true story) whereas games are data based,” he says. “…And you can’t beat data!”
Data and Geography
Zaloom’s foray into the gaming industry was a fortuitous accident. He was involved with the creation of a social network for kids called FaceChips. Zaloom notes that “social is pretty much the lifeblood of gaming” and that it’s difficult to have a successful game without some social aspect. Realizing kids wanted to play games as well as socialize, they built an API that would allow kids to play games made for Facebook, known as giantHello. “Little did we realize that would iterate into a casino gaming platform,” he says.
Eventually, Zaloom ended up co-founding The Las Vegas Whaling Company. He notes that building a new business is always a risk, even if you’re armed with data points, but being prepared to fail is a whole different thing.
Zaloom originally planned for Las Vegas Whaling Company to be a mobile games-of-chance provider. It is now transitioning into a skill-based geo-gaming platform though. “Consumers are now playing land-based games like Ingress and we see an exciting new market there,” Zaloom says.
He notes that geo/mobile is a new frontier. Users who play games like Ingress actually go out of their homes to play and socialize in the physical world as opposed to playing behind avatars. Zaloom believes that the innovative way that the platform becomes ubiquitous with the environment is underutilized so far and has game-changing potential.
Other than geo/mobile gaming, Zaloom believes that the other big gaming innovation to pay attention to is immersive 3D such as Oculus. “Imagine riding the tape in a slot machine as the bars and cherries appear,” he says. “What an experience that would be for the user!”
The Albatross of Gaming
Zaloom acknowledges that gambling can be a “bit of an albatross” for the gaming industry, but points to free-to-play content as the answer for some of the concerns surrounding gambling games. “Sell the fun, play down the gambling,” he says. “If it’s free to play, that means it’s pretty hard to lose your house — even if you were addicted.”
The other headache the gambling gaming market is experiencing is its maturation. “There are no more shortcuts to take,” Zaloom says. “Either you have bucketloads of money to license real math, create amazing art, and buy users, or — as we say in New Jersey — ‘fuggedaboutit.’” This is one of the reasons Zaloom and Las Vegas Whaling Company are aggressively pursuing geo/mobile and skill-based games.
Past, Present, and Future
While Zaloom hopes his next big accomplishment is in the geo/mobile arena — breaking the mold and creating a new form of gaming, he is currently most proud of his work with GoPlay, another company he founded before Las Vegas Whaling Company. “Being an early innovator in connecting land-based casinos with gaming platforms (was very pleasing),” he says.
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