Interviewing MediaSpark CEO Mathew Georghiou about his new Kickstarter campaign is a surprising experience. You start talking about the crowdfunding of his new board game and end up hearing about his growing portfolio of high-growth businesses.
Here’s the news we set off discussing: Sydney-based MediaSpark has launched a crowdfunding campaign for two table-top card games under its GoVenture brand. The games are called Entrepreneur and Monster Hunter. The company hopes to raise $5,000 in a campaign for the games, which will be available in September.
Beyond that, Georghiou revealed the exciting things happening at other businesses he heads under the MediaSpark umbrella. The massive multi-player online business education game GoVenture World, which he has been working on for years, will begin its initial tests soon. MediaSpark is in discussions with universities and community colleges about awarding credits for students who play GoVenture World, which simulates the actual business world.
And Georghiou is now raising capital for Lokol.me, the hyper-local news site that is now a hit in Cape Breton. The site received 650,000 unique visits in 10 months. He is seeking about $500,000 in funding for Lokol.me.
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Georghiou and a staff of 17 are now developing these products from the Sydney headquarters, and right now their focus is mainly on the crowdfunding campaign for the card games.
“We’ve been developing games for many years — all of our products are educational, though,” said Georghiou in an interview. “We wanted to try something that was more consumer-focused and not necessarily focused on education. Of course, every game is educational in some way.”
When it thought of a consumer card game, MediaSpark gravitated naturally to entrepreneurship, the subject of GoVenture World. So it came up with Entrepreneur, a game in which players have to sell a product.
But the team also wanted something that was completely different, so it came up with a companion game on a similar format, Monster Hunter, in which the players buy the weapons needed to hunt monsters.
Georghiou said it’s a common strategy for table-top games to crowdfund in pairs and then to consider marketing the two games separately in the future based on the feedback gained from the campaign.
“One curious stat is that on Kickstarter the table top games category has more funding than the video game category,” said Georghiou. “Crowdfunding has actually created a bit of resurgence in table top gaming. There are a lot of successes. Of course, there are a lot of failures as well . . . . It’s a very large market and a lot of competition.”
A few days into the campaign, Georghiou said the feedback has already led to a few possible changes in the product, such as in the design of the cards.