Bob Cooney sits down with Vasily Petrenko, CEO of Another World, the free-roam VR arcade network with roughly 400 signed partners in 50 countries, more than 300 locations open and another hundred in build-out. Vasily walks through the operating playbook behind that growth: the escape room business that started it, the sales training that tripled booking conversion, the corporate subscription model that fills weekday afternoons, and the royalty negotiation that could bring cultural experiences like Titanic into the network.

Key Highlights

• 00:00 – 03:40 | How Bob found Another World
  • A roadside sign in Koh Samui, two venues in Kuala Lumpur, and a KL owner who wants five locations
  • Three venues visited, two owners interviewed, every one of them expanding
• 03:40 – 09:15 | From Siberian escape rooms to The Deep
  • A bioengineer opens his city’s first escape room in 2014 and gets the investment back in two months
  • The comedy escape room everyone predicted would fail becomes the top room in the city
  • A two-minute free-roam demo sells two contracts before the game exists; the first game ships January 2019
• 09:15 – 17:05 | What a VR arcade is selling
  • Why escape room enthusiasts resist VR, and where the crossover funnel does work
  • Birthday parties: solve the parent’s problem and the sale is done
  • The North York corporate format: three hours sold, one hour played, the party room does the rest
• 17:05 – 21:00 | The merger and the network
  • The Deep’s developers combine with the Another World brand in 2020
  • 400 signed partners in 50 countries, and the strain of supporting that many markets
• 21:00 – 30:10 | The operating playbook
  • Hypothesis, experiment, track, scale: the scientific method from a Siberian science town
  • Business-coach role-play training, plus a social team that edits partner footage into weekly reels
  • Partners range from $10,000 to $40,000 plus per month; call-to-booking conversion tripled from under 20% to 45–60%; network revenue up around 49% in 2025
• 30:10 – 38:10 | Content built from statistics
  • The game library follows network-wide play data, from kids’ co-op to PvP
  • Schmuter and Kernel, the PvP games Bob tells everyone to go play
  • The tournament trick: 20 Canadian locations, two teams each, one national championship
• 38:10 – 48:15 | Corporate subscriptions and AI
  • The Polish partner’s unlock: companies pay about $1,000 a month for off-peak team sessions, and ten contracts cover the costs
  • Game guides are the product: greeting, hosting, upselling, and earning the review
  • AI outreach for corporate sales, and Facebook’s ad AI beating a 15-year marketer’s manual setups
• 48:15 – 56:18 | The silver quadrant
  • The Gate in Paris: 2,000 Titanic tickets a month on top of unchanged gaming revenue
  • Eclipso’s royalty ask is four times what Another World charges its own partners
  • Early conversations with Disney and Warner Brothers about bringing major IP into the games

🎧 Notable Quotes

“VR is just an instrument. It’s all about service. We provide service for people. We sell them time, happy time, their joy.”

— Vasily Petrenko on what an arcade actually sells (12:21)

“Adding one training multiplied three times the conversion rate from the calls to the bookings.”

— Vasily Petrenko on the network’s sales training (29:00)

“You need 10 clients which will bring you $10,000 in revenue, already covering all the costs.”

— Vasily Petrenko on corporate subscriptions (41:05)

— Bob Cooney on The Gate’s Titanic numbers (50:30)

“At 30 bucks a ticket, it’s 60,000 euros a month. That’s a lot of money that goes right to the bottom line.”