The early days
WGM’s history dates back to early 2009, when four men sat down together to discuss building a gaming information website designed to educate, inform and entertain people who love to bet.
By the time the dust had settled, the website had evolved into an offline paper magazine, which ironically gave birth to its own website! Both the paper magazine WGM and our website wgm8.com were born and that gang of four went on to become a team of over 30 people.
Our first pre-launch issue was produced in November 2009 which affectionately came to be known as “issue zero”. We only printed 1,000 copies of issue zero and they were never available to the general public. They may become collectors’ items one day!
We held our launch party in December 2009 in Macau and our first issue available to the public (Jan/Feb 2010) hit the streets towards the end of that month. WGM’s head office has been in Macau since our launch.
Our name and masthead evolve
What a long way we’ve come since then! Originally known as World Gaming magazine, our maiden masthead on issue zero (WGM#0) was a very different beast to the one you see now with the Pai Yao mascot in all yellow and gold colors and the English name much larger than the Chinese.
By the time WGM#1 came out Pai Yao had changed to red and yellow, but the first major step in the evolution of our masthead came in WGM#10 (May/Jun 2011) when we opted to make the Chinese name bigger and more prominent. This is the way it stayed for the next four years.
It was ultimately the changing face of Macau that led to our current masthead, which appeared for the first time on the cover of our Jan/Feb 2015 issue. Although the Chinese remains the same as previously, the magazine now goes simply by WGM in English – the removal of the word “gaming” reflected an increased focus on luxury entertainment lifestyle in our pages as opposed to a focus on gaming.
Following this trend, we also improved the quality of paper WGM is printed on with the magazine now featuring a matt finish on the cover and gold stamping on our logo.
Will this be the last time we change our masthead? Probably not! WGM is committed to evolving alongside Asia’s luxury entertainment market and as always we will strive to provide our readers with what we believe best serves them at any given time.
Our content
WGM’s content is divided into four departments:
- Gaming: mainly casino games, but also some non-casino gambling and even non-gambling games
- Sports betting: with a particular emphasis on international football
- Poker: especially Asian and Australian tournament poker
- Lifestyle: with particular relevance to luxury entertainment lifestyle such as reviews of restaurants, bars and spas in integrated resorts
Geographically, we focus on Macau first, the rest of Asia second and the rest of the world third. WGM has six issues per year (Jan/Feb, Mar/Apr, May/Jun, Jul/Aug, Sep/Oct and Nov/Dec) and every word of editorial content is presented in simplified Chinese and English.
We are highly experienced and knowledgeable about the world’s integrated resort and gaming entertainment industries. Our CEO has been in the gaming industry for 30 years and has visited well over 200 casinos worldwide. The combined gaming industry experience of our staff is hundreds of years.
Our distribution network
WGM is very widely distributed in Macau, with some secondary distribution in other Asian countries. Distribution points include many thousands of hotel rooms in Macau’s best hotels, Macau entry points such as the Gongbei border gate and the Hong Kong-Macau ferry terminal, saunas, spa and massage venues, numerous casinos, VIP rooms and poker rooms as well as a wide range of clubs, karaokes, bars, restaurants, lounges throughout Macau.
Our parent company
Our group’s first company was WGM, but it wasn’t the last. Joining WGM under the banner of parent company World Gaming Group (WGG) these days is World Gaming Consultants (WGC), World Players Entertainment (WPE) and World Media Network (WMN) while in 2015 we acquired Must Read Publications and highly respected B2B gaming magazine Inside Asian Gaming (IAG). Our corporate WGG office is located in Hong Kong.
For more information, please visit www.omediamacau.com.