Arkadium closes $5M in Series A funding

Casual game developer Arkadium today revealed it has accepted $5 million in Series A minority investment from Edison Ventures. The company says it will use the new funding to increase the number of titles it develops and expand its proprietary online distribution network.

Currently, the company has 150 employees between its offices in New York, Toronto and Ukraine, and it plans to double that number in the next three years.

This is the first major investment Arkadium has announced since the company was founded in 2001. “We’ve always taken our own path” Arkadium CEO Kenny Rosenblatt told us in an interview. “We moved at out own pace. It took us years to figure it out. We were always profitable but never enough. Now we finally feel like we know how to make games and that this will be a good return on investment.”

As Inside Social Games reported in January 2012, Arkadium has a publishing deal with Microsoft Studios which sees the company developing and releasing games on Windows 8 and Windows RT devices. Rosenblatt said he was happy with the deal and that he considers Windows 8 a pillar of Arkadium’s business. Four of Arkadium’s games have been within the top 10 of the Windows 8 app store for three months.

Rosenblatt was particularly excited about the touch capability of the operating system which he says “opens up the design playbook.” Arkadium’s Taptiles, for example, works with both mouse and keyboard and touch controls. Adding this feature to all future Arkadium games is a goal for the company going forward, Rosenblatt said.

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Arkadium examines the '5 W's of Social Game Purchases' [Infographic]

Arkadium has long been more than just a game developer, as the name behind Mahjongg Dimensions is also interested in the how's or why's associated with social games. This is true once again this week as the company has released the results of a March 2012 survey of over 1,500 gamers that details purchases in social games, along with the reasoning behind why gamers make purchases in their favorite social games.

The survey was made up of mainly players between the ages of 18 and 34, as 61% of players surveyed fell into that age rage. Interestingly, of those surveyed, 45% of men and 37% of women had made purchases in at least one Facebook game (I might have thought it was the other way around). What doesn't come as a surprise are the genres in which most of that money is being spent, with "Simulation and Building" games accounting for 69% of purchases (games like Zynga's FarmVille and CityVille are prime examples of money-makers in that "genre"). Meanwhile, games like Arkadium's own Mahjongg Dimensions, which would fall in the Arcade or Action category, only accounts for 22% of purchases.

While spontaneous purchases might account for a small portion of money spent in Facebook games, most players aren't willing to invest money into a product until they've been playing the game for at least a week. Unfortunately, those purchases sometimes go to waste, as only 49% of players say that they still play every game they've purchased items in after 6 months. Then again, this could be looked at in comparison to $0.99 mobile apps, which are normally abandoned just as quickly (or quicker). At least here, gamers are playing something for free and can come back to the product at any time to find (normally) an incredibly updated experience.

Arkadium's survey results are full of fun factoids like these, and you can find the full infographic below (click on the image to make it larger).

Are your surprised by some of the results of this survey? Have you ever invested real money in a Facebook game? Sound off in the comments.

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Arkadium: Social gamers are much more likely to spend on Sim or building games

Part two of Arkadium’s recent research on social games monetization shows that 69 percent of purchasers have purchased in a Sim or building game. The survey was conducted with 1,576 US users 18 years and older who have played a game on Facebook before. You can read Arkadium’s first part of the report here and the second here.

Casino and card games (like Zynga’s popular Texas HoldEm Poker) come in at a distant second with only 27 percent of players having purchased there.

When asked why they purchased 51 percent of players who participated in the study responded they purchase to decorate or personalize. 44 percent responded they purchase to gain an edge.

When asked what they purchased 46 percent of purchasers said they they buy game upgrades and 52 percent said they typically stay within the $0-$5 range for in-game purchases.

The research also shows that players spend a period of time with a game before they decide to purchase in it and that once they make the decision they tend commit to one or two games.

67 percent of buyers wait more than a week before they’re convinced to purchase in a Facebook game and 49 percent of buyers report they are still playing all of the games in which they have purchased six months later. Nearly half of all purchasers only spend in one game per month and 79 percent spend in two or fewer games per month.

Not surprisingly, when asked they stopped buying in a specific game most players — 29 percent — indicated financial reasons or lost interest. 23 percent indicated they had moved on to another game, and only 15 percent said they stopped because they ran out of content.

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Arkadium signs social game publishing deal with Microsoft Studios

Social and casual game developer Arkadium announced a multi-year publishing partnership with Microsoft Studios today that will help the developer accelerate its cross-platform game development.

Though few details were available on the agreement, we assume that it applies to Microsoft’s Bing, MSN Messenger and Zone.com games portal where Arkadium games already appear. Beyond that, it is likely that Microsoft Studios would publish the games on Xbox Live Arcade or Windows Phone 7. It is unclear if the publishing deal extends to Facebook, where Arkadium currently enjoys 1 million monthly active users and over 200,000 daily active users as recorded by our AppData traffic tracking service.

Statements included in the press releases from Microsoft Studios’ Matt Booty, general manager of connected experiences, suggest that Microsoft is looking to expand its publishing beyond its web services, console and phone. Assuming the tech giant isn’t attempting to launch a social network of its own to compete with Facebook and Google+, we could perhaps expect to see Microsoft Studios-published games on these platforms. Already, Microsoft has begun to soften its stance on publishing for rival platforms, recently bringing a version of its Xbox 360 game Kinectimals to iOS.

“Arkadium has a ten-year track record of developing entertaining and well-architected casual and social games,” Booty’s statement reads. “Our team is excited to be partnering with a developer that we believe will help us entertain millions of people as we expand our reach to a broader audience.”

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Microsoft Studios gets social games savvy, buddies up with Arkadium

The studio that now brings you Halo and the Forza Motorsport racing series for the Xbox 360 just got down with the Facebook. Microsoft Studios announced a strategic partnership with Arkadium for the latter to create cross-platform social games to be launched by the former. According to Arkadium, this multi-year partnership is an evolution of the duo's existing relationship.

"We are very excited to be working with Microsoft Studios to develop casual and social cross-platform experiences," Arkadium CEO Kenny Rosenblatt said in a release. "We have been looking to strategically partner with a company that can help catapult our business and accelerate Arkadium's cross platform game development. Microsoft is the perfect partner to help us realize our growth strategy."

However, what's unclear is just how this partnership will work out. Microsoft Studios acts as both a developer and a publisher to its existing game franchises, namely Halo, which is developed by 343 Industries (formerly Bungie). Is that how the studio will interact with New York-based Arkadium, best known for its Mahjongg Dimensions series on Facebook?

"Arkadium has a ten-year track record of developing entertaining and well-architected casual and social games," GM of Connected Experiences for Microsoft Studios Matt Booty said. "Our team is excited to be partnering with a developer that we believe will help us entertain millions of people as we expand our reach to a broader audience."

Well, that doesn't leave with much more answered. Arkadium has partnered with numerous organizations to increase the reach of its social games, most recently The Los Angeles Times and CNN. This, however, seems as if Microsoft Studios will simply provide Arkadium with more resources to create the game they're already making (and perhaps on new platforms?). Your guess is as good as ours, but we've contacted Arkadium for comment.

Why do you think Microsoft Studios has partnered with Arkadium in such a big way? Are you a fan of Arkadium's games, and what do you hope comes of this announcement? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

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New Jobs This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Youtopia, Arkadium, NaturalMotion & More

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Youtopia, Arkadium, NaturalMotion, Breaktime Studios, lolgames, and wooga.

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

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