Atlantic Lotto abandons Geosweep

CBC News reports that the Atlantic Lotto is pulling the plug on its GeoSweep online game, having sunk Cdn$8.7 million for a stake in Geonomics, formerly known as Roboreus, the U.K. firm behind the online lottery.

“We’ve made the decision to remove the GeoSweep game from the market today,” Patrick Daigle, chief financial officer with Atlantic Lotto, told CBC News Friday. “The game hasn’t lived up to its potential in this market.”

Daigle said the lottery corporation will stop offering the game in Atlantic Canada as of July 4.

The New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island governments opted into the investment, each contributing Cdn$4 million of that total. Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia opted out.

Daigle gave an assurance that the investment in Geonomics is secure. He said the British company is revising the game and will launch it in the U.K. later this summer.

“We do believe that the latest version of the game is going to hold player appeal,” he said, adding that European lottery broker Tipp24 recently acquired an interest in the company, which he viewed as a positive sign.

GeoSweep was launched more than a year ago with a heavy promotional campaign, including TV ads, billboards, and buses but Daigle declined to provide cost details on the marketing effort, saying:

“It’s not our practice to release internal business cases and projections.”

Nor would he discuss GeoSweep’s sales in Atlantic Canada. “I’m not at liberty to disclose specific financial data,” Daigle said.

CBC News reports that Atlantic Lotto’s GeoSweep game has never paid out its daily Cdn$250,000 grand prize in more than a year’s worth of draws, and concludes that this is an indication of poor sales take up.

Geosweep is a digital and geographic location based lottery. Instead of picking numbers, players go online to pick a location on a map of Atlantic Canada. There are more than 2.3 million such locations, called Geos, up for grabs. The cost to own a Geo is Cdn$7.50 for 30 days.

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