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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Wedge Buster secures $2.2M in venture funding, launches social and mobile apps

 Wedge Buster today announced it’s secured $2.2 million in a Series A round of funding, as well as the launch of its social platform.

The funding comes from a variety of investors, including 37 Technology Ventures and Rob Dyrdek (best-known for his pro-skateboarding and various MTV reality shows). The money will be used to accelerate the company’s game development, support marketing and building up Wedge Buster’s distribution network. According to CEO and co-founder Scott Philp, the company is planning to launch one to two new games on both social and mobile platforms per quarter.

The company’s eponymous Wedge Buster Sports is a social sports game platform that recently began appearing on our list of emerging Facebook games. The platform is launching with 100 games to play, many of which are variations of popular web games that have been given a sports theme (Bejewled becomes Ball-Jeweled). Players can challenge their friends to asynchronous matches or enter tournaments with strangers, betting soft currency on the outcome. Philp tells us the company’s focused on sports games because, “no one is doing sports right in social.”

The games monetize in three different ways: Aside from the sale of currency, there are also video ads that play before the start of each game and Philp tells us brand partners are lining up. While he isn’t willing to share what percentage of revenue is currently coming from the brand partnerships, he says it’s a useful stream of income to have while the platform builds up a sizable user base.

Meanwhile, the developer’s first mobile game Battle Darts is nearing completion and should launch for smartphones towards the end of October. Philp tells us Wedge Buster is planning to build up its own brand of sports games under the “Battle” label. Like its social counterparts, Battle Darts allows users to engage in asynchronous matches with their friends and allows them to send drinks to their friends to make the dartboard harder to hit. The game will come in both premium and free (ad-supported) versions, and will also monetize via the purchase of virtual goods like better darts and new dartboards.

“These platforms offer enormous opportunities that aren’t being maximized for sports. We are scaling sports games in a way that’s never been done before,” Philp says. “We know how to be the true leader in sports social gaming: We need a cross channel strategy that includes social, mobile and web.”

According to our AppData traffic-tracking service, Wedge Buster Sports currently has 30,000 monthly active users and 2,000 daily active users, but Philp tells us the average play session is 14 minutes.

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Mob Science raises $1M in funding, preps mid-core RPG for launch on Zynga.com

Social game developer Mob Science landed $1 million in seed funding from angel investors, including Joyent CEO David Young and GameSpy Industries founder Mark Surfa.

Mob Science plans to use the money for product development and to hire at least four more staff members — a full list of positions is available on the company’s website. The ten-person company is also moving to a new office in the city of Carlsbad, CA.

The funding probably couldn’t come at a better time for Mob Science. Its earlier games inFamous Anarchy, Coffee Bar and Snowball Fight all had solid traffic numbers when they first launched, but none of them are presently drawing more than 1,000 daily active users according to our AppData traffic tracking service.

CEO Michael Witz tells Inside Social Games Mob Science stopped supporting its live games so the company could work on its next project — a fantasy role-playing game targeted at the mid-core market, tentatively titled “KingWorld.” The game will be one of the first third party titles to debut on Zynga’s social games platform, Zynga.com. Witz also explains how the developer stayed on its feet, even though it’s located nowhere near Silicon Valley and its games aren’t monetizing right now.

“We’ve had our ups and downs as a company,” he says. “In December 2009, we had 27 million monthly users and we were only four people. We’ve been good stewards of the capital we’ve been able to earn … when times are tight we’re able to cut back and keep overhead low. Now that this financing has come through, we’re able to scale up and make a bet on our next game.”

Witz previously told us Zynga’s platform saves the developer the trouble of staffing a marketing arm, allowing his team to instead focus on creating quality games. In the case of mid-core fantasy RPGs, “KingWorld” just might fit the bill for Zynga.com, which currently doesn’t offer a mid-core strategy title. The only title in Zynga’s Facebook wheelhouse that fits that description is the modern war-themed Empires & Allies, which currently boasts over 14 million MAU and 2.1 million DAU. Witz says KingWorld’s appeal will come from its depth, which rests between something like Kabam’s Kingdoms of Camelot and a Zynga’s traditional “Ville” titles.

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Retro football game Gridiron Heroes raises funding via Kickstarer

Fledgling developer Pixel Rampage has managed to secure funding for Gridiron Heroes, an NES-style football game that will launch on Facebook in beta mode this April.

Gridiron Heroes is a football team-manager sim inspired by Tecmo Bowl. Players establish their own football franchise and handle almost every detail imaginable: choosing the team name and logo, managing the player roster and training athletes are only a few of the tasks that have to be accomplished. Ultimately, players will be placed into leagues with their friends and then start playing one another. Seasons last four weeks at a time, with each player getting to play one league game a day.

American football on Facebook is dominated by two titles: Madden NFL Superstars and Quickhit NFL Football. While both of these games are still operating, Quickhit NFL Football has never really managed to take off (at its peak, the game had 90,000 MAU, now it’s down to 20,000). Madden NFL Superstars, meanwhile, is holding steady at around 600,000 MAU, though that’s a far cry from when the game had over 2 million MAU back in 2010.

Pixel Rampage sought $7,500 on Kickstarter, the crowd funding website that helps groups raise money for creative projects. In order for a Kickstarter project to be successful, the stated financial goal has to be reached within one to two months. Pixel Rampage needed to raise the money to cover fees for software licensing and server costs. Up until the last minute, the likelihood of the game getting the support it needed looked doubtful. However, enough backers came through and Gridiron Heroes wound up with $7,613 pledged when the time frame closed.

According to Pixel Rampage co-founder David Murray, those who backed the game will have character customization options available to them, but only while the game’s in beta. Other than that, there are no other immediate bonuses planned for backers, though these players will have extra content made available as the game expands.

“We reached out to our fans, because ultimately they will be the ones playing the game,” said Murray. “Letting them name players and create content for the game seemed like a fitting reward — something they’ll really appreciate when they see the character named after themselves winning our version of the Super Bowl.”

The developer decided to pursue crowd funding because it wants to remain totally independent. Murray explained that he hadn’t tried to work with a publisher on the game and that they have no plans to.

“We’re indie through and through, and we love it this way,” he said. “As we grow we might consider looking into it further, but right now we’re happy where we are.”

Kickstarter is proving increasingly popular with independent developers looking to get their dream projects funded, especially now that Double Fine made headlines across the Web and broke records with the millions it raised.

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Seismic Games opens doors with $2 million in funding for the “next wave” of social games

Los Angeles-based Seismic Games has secured a $2 million first round of funding to put toward reinventing social games. The round was led by DFJ Frontier, venture capitalist Tom Matlack and had participation from a handful of unnamed investors with deep ties to the entertainment industry.

Founded by gaming industry veterans Greg Borrud (Pandemic Studios, EA), Eric Gewirtz (Pandemic Studios, Activision) and Chris Miller (Vivendi Universal), the trio have console hits like Star Wars: Battlefront, F.E.A.R and The Saboteur under their belts and are hoping those successes can be translated to Facebook. The company is one of many social gaming startups founded by former console developers hoping to pivot into social games, and faces competition from the likes of Outplay Entertainment, Row Sham Bow, LootDrop and Rumble, all of whom have AAA console talent and years of industry experience behind them.

Even as the cost of doing business increases on the platform, Seismic’s CEO Greg Borrud is confident that the combination of character driven gameplay and real-world events will make Seismic’s first game a hit when it debuts later this year. Inside Social Games had an opportunity to talk to Borrud, and while he didn’t reveal much about the company’s upcoming first game, he did reveal the development philosophy behind it.

Inside Social Games: You’ve talked a bit about creating the “next” generation of social games. What do you mean by this? 

Greg Borrud (pictured, right): When we first looked at the [social gaming space] we were incredibly excited by what was there. It’s a larger audience than what we’d been making games for previously and social game companies are creating new ways of reaching their audiences and tapping into the free-to-play monetization model.

But, I think we’ve hit a point where there has to be more than analytics-based game design. The Zyngas of the world have perfected this idea of looking at how gamers play and post-launch tweaking the system to get the most out of every single user.  At some point you perfect that so much that you lose the heart and the soul and the entertainment value of the game.

We want to take some of the things we’ve done when we were making console games and marry that with the analytics-based approach to game design to create a hybrid that captures all the viral marketing but gives players something new, fresh and really compelling. I see 2012 as embarking on the second wave of social games that will become deeper and more complex. Our goal is to be part of that conversation.

ISG: The cost per install (CPI) can be quite high on Facebook. What’s your plan to gain traction on the platform?

Borrud: Whenever you’re making a game, you’re thinking about user acquisition. The first thing you’ve got to do make a high quality game. If the game is great on a platform like Facebook, the game is going to spread, so we’ve put a lot of thought into how we can create a game that’s unique, different and compelling — something that people want to play and will encourage others to play. Secondly, we’ve raised some funds so we’re going to advertise. We’re going to go directly to our target audience and pull as many players over as we can with the funds that we’ve got. Lastly, the nature of the product that we’re making allows for a lot of sponsorship opportunities, and that allows us to tap into a lot of what’s happening in the world, and by drawing those things into the product, that allows us to reach new groups through their own viral networks, bringing those users into our network as well.

ISG: Sponsorship opportunities?

Borrud: This ties into our concept of tying the real world with the virtual world. As you get closer to the real world, products fit better and make that virtual world feel more real. As we introduce real-time content, we have an opportunity to grab branded products, sponsorship and promotions and infuse them into the world we’re creating. From the gamer’s perspective, it makes the world we’re creating more alive and more like what they see when they walk out the door.  For sponsors it means deep integration, but not in a forced way like what’s happening in some games now.

ISG: We know you and the other founders have a lot of console experience – how are you applying that experience to social games?

Borrud: We’re trying to avoid being a hardcore product for a small group of people. We want to draw on light RPG elements but it’s from a point of making the game more compelling. We’re surprised that in social games there’s not a lot of character-based games. What we’re talking about is how to get closer to the character and how to add more customization to it so it’s even more unique. It happened in traditional gaming and I think it’s going to happen again in social gaming.

The last thing I want to do is attack a model that’s done incredibly well, but I think there’s an opportunity to take customization even further. There’s a difference between customizing my personal space and building customization around a character. A character is much more personal.

ISG: You’ve also mentioned user generated content, which isn’t something you see all that often in social games. How will this work?

Borrud: This is a cornerstone of what we’re trying to do. Facebook is user generated content and we think the game should be the exact same thing. This has been done before in console and open world games, and we want to give the player those tools so they create something new that they want to share. User generated content will be a reflection of the player into every game we make, not just our first game.

ISG: How do you plan to integrate real-time content into a social game?

Borrud: This is an opportunity we haven’t really had in traditional games, but [with Facebook] we’re communicating with the player constantly. Companies are constantly tweaking their games and we looked at this as an opportunity not only to refine the gameplay dynamic, but to start to blur the lines between what is happening in the real world versus what is happening in the virtual world. Real-time content means something’s just happened in the real world — how can that be reflected tomorrow in the game? That’s an opportunity to do something unique and different and to get players to come back to see how the game and how their character in the game is reacting to it. We’re talking about a “ripped from the headlines” feel to the game.

ISG: That reminds us of sci-fi stories, where you have characters who play online games and the characters they play become extensions of their personality and their real lives.

Borrud: That’s exactly right. People have dabbled in this, but with this audience and Facebook and everything being tweaked post release we saw it as an opportunity to bring the real world into a virtual world.

ISG: Obviously you’re focusing on Facebook, but what are your plans for other platforms?

Borrud: Facebook is a platform for us in the same way the Xbox and the PC are platforms. We develop our games as much as we can to be platform agnostic so it can move from Facebook to Google+ to an iPad with a little bit of work but without having to re-write the whole system. That said, Facebook is the predominant platform and that’s our clear number one focus. It’s got a huge number of users, a great infrastructure, a low barrier of entry and great viral components.

ISG: You mentioned iPads — are you planning to be cross platform at some point?

Borrud: You can’t just port a game over and have it be as successful. You need to think about the platform, the play styles and the play habits of people and design the game in such a way that it enhances the experience and makes sense on the platform. That’s absolutely in our plans for the future, but for a launch strategy, we’re clearly focused on Facebook.

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Social-Meets-Pokémon MinoMonsters Headed to iOS With $1M in Seed Funding

San Francisco-based MinoMonsters has received $1 million in seed funding to develop its eponymous iOS game. The funding was lead by Andreessen Horowitz, the same firm that invested in TinyCo, Boku and Tiny Speck.

MinoMonsters isn’t the first company to try and bring a Pokémon styled game to iOS. Gaia Online has had difficulty converting the popularity of its Facebook game Monster Galaxy into mobile success. In just one month, Monster Galaxy: The Zodiac Islands has seen a steady decline in both revenue and popularity, dropping from the #91 spot on the top grossing apps chart down to #320 according to AppData. However, MinoMonsters is betting that its deep social integration will set it apart from other Pokémon styled games on the platform and give Buckley and Murphy the kind hit they’re looking for.

Read the rest on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

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Social TV Games Platform PlayJam Scores $5M Round of Funding

Social TV games platform developer PlayJam closed a $5 million first round of investment with participation from GameStop Digital Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Endeavour Ventures, London Venture Partners, and several unnamed “game industry luminaries.”

PlayJam’s platform provides developers an infrastructure similar to what we find in other web games portals and social networks: messaging support, monetization, score tracking, integration with Facebook and Twitter, etc. The key difference here is that PlayJam supplies the games on smart TVs manufactured by Samsung, LG, Panasonic and Sony. This distinction might not change the nature of the games themselves all that much (with the exception of improved graphics), but it could open up a new demographic for social game developers to monetize.

The press release announcing the funding states that PlayJam has seen over 6 billion downloads Pay TV platforms in the last five years, with more than 50% of customers paying for content at an average session time of 23 minutes. The release goes on to cite studies claiming that smart TVs will see an install base of over one billion devices by the end of 2015. According to some — like Crowdstar, which closed a $23 million round from Intel and Time Warner among other investors — smart TVs will be the next major platform for social game developers to conquer.

It’s interesting that GameStop is getting behind smart TV games. For the last year or so, the video game retailer has been proactive in exploring digital distribution options as physical sales of video games have declined and larger audiences have emerged in social and mobile gaming. Adobe’s involvement makes more sense to us, as the newly launched AIR 3 is compatible with smart TVs — making PlayJam’s platform the perfect test partner for the platform native extension support.

PlayJam intends to use this first round of funding to increase growth in Asian and U.S. markets. The company also recently announced partnerships with social and casual game developers Slingo, Puzzler and Relentless Software (longtime developer on Sony Computer Entertainment’s Buzz! franchise).

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Peak Games Raises $11.5M in Funding, Acquires Two Studios and Expands Into South America and Mexico

Social game developer and publisher Peak Games announced a second round of funding today from Earlybird Venture Capital to the tune of $11.5 million. The company has also acquired two developers and expanded operations into South America and Mexico.

When we last spoke with Peak Games, the company was experiencing a wave of growth on Facebook in Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa. The secret to its success in this case was a mix of in-house developed games that met the specific needs of the regions’ audiences and publishing-localization agreements with developers like TheBroth for top-performing titles. Today, Peak Games’ Chief Strategy Officer Rina Onur tells us that the company will keep up more of the same, with support from new games, new partners, and new regional offices in the Middle East and North Africa.

“We’ve done two strategy core studio acquisitions,” Onur says, explaining how the latest round of funding is being spent. “We want to reach 100 people in our [new] Oman office. The rest is going to be talent and studio acquisitions in Turkey and the Middle East.”

The two studios acquired by Peak Games, Umaykut and Erikhan, are both based out of Turkey. Umaykut is a strategy game for the open web rooted in Turkish history while Erlikhan is a fantasy-themed strategy game for Facebook. Onur tells us that with the acquisition of these two studios, Peak Games moves beyond its current in-house portfolio of card and board games into the rapidly expanding strategy genre currently dominated by Kabam, Kixeye, and more casual strategy titles from Zynga and Digital Chocolate.

As for expanding its Facebook game offerings through partnerships, Peak Games and RockYou recently announced an agreement to publish Zoo World 2 in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa. Onur says that Peak Game users have been wanting a game similar in theme to Zoo World franchise for a long time, which contributed to the recent success of ??????? ???????, an Arabic-language farming sim developed by Halfquest and published by Peak Games.

The key, explains Onur, is localizing the game for the region in the most natural way possible. “Peak Games has been so successful in this region because international companies have been pushing games in English or in poorly localized versions in Arabic and Turkish,” she says. “Our focus is these emerging markets, so our [games] are highly polished. I think that’s one of the secret sauces to our success. We have aspirations of developing Arabic-specific games for the region as well.”

Over the past six months, we’ve seen companies concentrate on hyper-localized versions of social games for both emerging and established markets. A major barrier these companies face is establishing regional branches in countries that have vastly different business cultures from their own. As an example, it took PopCap Games years to build its offices in Asia and still more time on top of that for the studio to begin producing PopCap content for its market. The content that studio produces is so vastly different from what the Western audience expects that PopCap doesn’t bother to localize its Asian-developed titles for North America or Europe.

On Facebook, Peak Games current enjoys a cumulative 16 million monthly active users and 3.7 million daily active users across all its published and developed games (including figures from the recently-acquired Erlikhan). Its largest game by traffic in MAU is the in-house developed Okey while DAU is dominated by Komsu Çiftlik, which Peak Games publishes in the region on behalf of TheBroth. You can follow the developer-publisher’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

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6waves Lolapps Confirms Funding From Nexon, Insight Venture Partners

Recently merged social game developer and publisher 6waves Lolapps confirmed today that it has raised funding, naming Nexon and Insight Venture Partners as investors.

Though 6waves Lolapps did not disclose terms of the investment, previous reports based on an SEC filing put the total at $35 million.

While the New York-based Insight Ventire Partners has had a history of backing social game companies, Korean company Nexon is fairly new to the space — both as an investor and a developer. Its most recent activity was the public beta launch of Maple Story: Adventures, a Facebook role-playing adventure game based on Nexon’s long-running MMO, Maple Story. Prior to that, the company invested $5 million in social game developer A Bit Lucky.

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TheBroth Open to Funding for Facebook and Mobile Social Games, but Happy to Do Its Own Domo Thing

Barn Buddy developer TheBroth has had a long, healthy life on Facebook without raising funding or advertising on the platform, CEO Markus Weichselbaum tells us. With the release of Planet Domo and the developer looking at getting into paid mobile games, however, he says it may be time “if you allow me the pun, to harvest our investments.”

Weichselbaum is founder and CEO of TheBroth, which began as a community website based out of Perth, Australia in 2005. The company had some success with early apps on Facebook, including the 2007 jigsaw simulation game PuzzleBee. In 2008, TheBroth relocated to San Francisco and began steady releases of one major game per year to Facebook and eventually other social networks like hi5 and international social networks in Europe. This year, the developer worked with licensee Big Tent Entertainment to produce a social game based on Japanese TV mascot, Domo, which debuted on Facebook late last month with strong early growth.

“[Big Tent] heard through the grapevine that we were good with localization and multiplatform [releases] and they figured well, that’s the right kind of company to approach,” Weichselbaum tells ISG. “And we liked Domo. He doesn’t have a particular facial expression. He can be happy or angry and you wouldn’t know the difference. So you can project a lot onto Domo. If you make your own Domo, it’s really an expression of self. That makes him really ideal for a game because he’s so malleable and so accessible.”

Accessibility is a key component of TheBroth games. Having its roots in the early days of Facebook games gave the developer incentive to keep gameplay design simple and immediately available after only a few minutes of tutorial. Even today, the Barn Buddy tutorial is only six screens long and the Planet Domo tutorial is considerably shorter than other mission-based adventure games of comparable complexity.

The only downside to this quick-play approach is that TheBroth has sometimes had to sacrifice presentation. Particularly with its early games like Kickmania, the art style and presentation date the game in a way that could turn off a social gamer new to the space and therefore more accustomed to higher art quality. Weichselbaum says that TheBroth would like to go back to Kickmania and some of its older titles to bring them up to speed; but right now, its focusing its resources elsewhere.

“We’re a small company, we don’t have all the resources to do what we want to do right now,” he says. He explains that with Kickmania, TheBroth originally wanted to do a “female” version of the game because the premise of “kicking someone’s ass” was just too male-oriented to achieve mass appeal. That never came about, though, and now TheBroth is instead looking at bringing the game to mobile.

“Kickmania is my favorite and one of the most promising of gameplay types out there combining social aspects and casual gameplay,” Weichselbaum says. “The whole look of it is sort of 2008, so there’s a lot of work to bring this one into modern times. We feel this is going to be ideal for mobile.”

Right now, Weichselbaum TheBroth has a few free apps available on mobile devices, but he wouldn’t say what they were or where we could find them. TheBroth is still experimenting with game types and techniques for releasing games to mobile. Some of their older Facebook properties would actually be better suited to tablets and iPads, he says.

“We think that our games are less suited to smaller screens, but would have a fantastic place on tablets,” Weichselbaum says. The key concern, he explains, is finding games that are action-based, preferably grounded in physics as opposed to mission-based social games like Barn Buddy and Planet Domo. In the case of smartphones and feature phones, the game needs to use the core features of the platform in a way that jibes with gameplay. For exmaple, Weichselbaum says, TheBroth’s Hoop Fever Live would be the perfect candidate for iOS and Android because all players need to do is drag a finger to plan the trajectory for a basketball — and that’s it.

“For mobile, you want something something you can do on the bus,” he says. “You can just take it out and throw some more angry birds at some pigs. It makes sense — a short interaction you can go back to whenever you want. This is an action game you can play for 30 seconds and it’ll be really fun.”

Another game type TheBroth wants to revisit for mobile is jigsaw puzzles. The developer has proprietary technology that supports an actual puzzle simulation where players either need to drag pieces in order to rotate them or can toggle an auto-rotate mode that activates when the player selects a puzzle piece. This technology is currently in use within PuzzleBee and forms a Planet Domo mini-game; Weichselbaum could easily see it as a standalone jigsaw title for iPad or tablet — but not for smartphone.

“Your finger is obscuring the puzzle pieces,” he complains. “I haven’t seen a single good jigsaw puzzle on the iPhone for example. Not because people can’t program well but because the device just doesn’t lend itself. For iPad, we can’t wait to release [a jigsaw puzzle] game. It’s a no brainer.”

As ambitious as TheBorth is to get into mobile, however, there is still the need to balance the limited resources the developer has. Whenever TheBroth has worked on releasing a new game, its existing games has lost traffic as the developer cuts back on content releases. With Barn Buddy, the game first lost a significant chunk of daily active users as TheBroth worked with publisher Peak Games to release the Turkish language version of the game, Komsu Çiftlik, and then DAU took another huge hit while TheBroth scaled back content again ahead of Planet Domo’s release (pictured here).

Going forward, TheBroth has new content releases planned for both Barn Buddy and Planet Domo in the form of a competitive community event for the former and new gameplay features and levels for the latter. Mobile development and international releases are progressing at a rate that pleases Weichselbaum, though he admits that scaling would be easier with funding.

“The time may come this year where it may make sense to raise significant funding to accelerate and utilize our ability that we have because are multiplatform and multi-language,” he says. “[Scale] requires man power, it requires funding, it requires an advertising budget. Without funding, we can’t really do that as well as the big guys. But for right now, we’re quite happy to do our thing and grow organically.”

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Social Game Publisher Portalarium Scores $2.4 Million Second Round of Funding

Portalarium, the games publisher/developer and service provider of a 3D plugin for social games on Facebook, announced a $2.4 million round of funding today. This brings the company’s total funding up to $3.6 million.

The Austin-based company is the latest venture from game developer and entrepreneur Richard Garriott, known for his work on the Ultima PC game series and the massively multiplayer game, Ultima Online. He founded Portalarium with the intent to bring premium social games to the web. So far, the company has launched two games, Port Casino Poker and Port Casino Blackjack, to Facebook and hi5. Neither game appears to have found much traffic on those platforms, however, Port Casino Poker recently launched on iPad and has an iPhone/Android version planned for release later this year.

Meanwhile, Portalarium also licenses a 3D plugin to other social game developers, which we recently saw for the first time in A Mystical Land, developed by Mad Otter Games. Portalarium says it plan to announce its new game this summer.

This round of funding was led by m8 Capital with participation from Founders Fund. The former focuses exclusive on mobile technology investments, while Founders Fund contributed to Portalarium’s first round.

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Richard 'Lord British' Garriott scores $3.6M in Portalarium funding

by Joe Osborne, Posted Jun 1st 2011 10:55AM

The Ultima name rings strong in the ears of investors (we guess) as its creator Richard Garriott has raised $3.6 million in funding for his Austin, Texas-based start up, Portalarium. VentureBeat reports that much of funding came from m8 Capital in the U.K. and San Francisco's Founders Fund based on the aim that Garriott will exploit the business opportunities in the social games business.

There's an "E" word we don't like hearing too often, but judging from an interview regarding his company earlier this year, it appears that he intends to make Ultima-grade experiences on Facebook. Regardless, who isn't in this industry to make a few bucks--as long as he makes some fun, perhaps genuine, Facebook games, we're all peachy keen.

"We are delighted to join Richard Garriott and the Portalarium team in creating the next great gaming company," Joseph Kim, partner at m8 Capital, said. "Richard is one of the giants of the industry. He's a proven entrepreneur and has been a driving force at each of the industry's major turning points." Yeah, yeah, but will it top orbiting Earth in space? Didn't think so.

[Image Credit: Richard Garriott]

Do you think Garriott is onto something with Portalarium? Are you excited to see what he comes up with? Share with us in the comments. Add Comment.

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Tags: lord british, lord britishs new britannia, portalarium, portalarium-player, Richard Garriott, Richard Garriott portalarium, Richard-Garriott, ultima, Ultima Online, Ultima-Online

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Peak Games Finds Growth In Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, Secures $5 Million in Funding

Turkish and Middle Eastern developer Peak Games announced a $5 million round of series A investment today, led by Earlybird Venture Capital. This brings the developer’s total funding up to $7.5 million toward expanding its social games library in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa (abbreviated as MENA), and other regions.

According to our social game traffic tracking service, AppData, Peak Games currently enjoys a combined 8.4 million monthly active users and 1.6 million daily active users across both its in-house developed games and its published titles. Its top performing in-house titles are variations on the Turkish tile game, Okey, which is a form of rummy. Its top performing published title is a farming sim called Komsu Çiftlik, developed by TheBroth.

What makes Peak Games truly unique is its success in emerging regions that Western developers often dismiss as regions as places that don’t monetize well. Peak Games CEO Sidar Sahin explains that this is a misconception of these regions that comes from developers that don’t understand the audiences of the region. For its part, Sahin says that Peak Games has seen much higher average revenues per user in Turkey and MENA than it has in Russia, China, or Eastern Europe. He explains that Peak Games succeeds in monetizing in these regions because the developer knows what the audience wants, whereas other developer stumble over fundamental cultural difference.

For example, Sahin and Peak Games co-founder/CSO Rina Onur explain to ISG that in Turkey and the MENA region, day-to-day socialization between potential social game players doesn’t occur in the same places or with the same frequency as it does with Western social game players who can go out to bars or tennis courts to meet people. This means that actual socialization in-game is something the Turkish and MENA audiences crave, usually in the form of private chat rooms and in games that require multiple players to participate online at roughly the same time — like board games and card games.

Peak Games succeeds at monetizing with this audience by providing a “VIP” subscription access to its games, which allows users to form private chat rooms to interact with other players. While subscription models haven’t performed well in Western-developed social games, it does seem to be a winning strategy in the MENA region. We’ve recently seen a strategy “VIP” paid level of access in Israel-based Playtika’s Farkle Pro. It seems this model lends itself well to lifetime user value and overall conversion of players. Peak Games estimates the lifetime value of a board game player at one year.

The trick for Peak Games will be keeping its brand distinct, even as competing developers encroach on its game types. For example, Turkish developer Mynet has a similar lineup of titles that feature the Okey game type. Peak Games will also have to look at expanding to other regions, which the developer has begun to do in Latin America with a new studio recently opened in São Paulo, Brazil.

For now, Sahin says the focus of the funding will be on hiring new staff for in-house development, some investment in new regional offices and new talent for those offices, on mobile platform expansions, and also on marketing and user acquisition. Up until now, Peak Games has relied primarily on viral growth — and it seems to have paid off, with several of its games recently appearing on our top 20 lists of games by growth.

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Kobojo Lands $7.5 Million in Funding For Marketing, Regional Branches

French social game developer Kobojo announced a $7.5 million (€5.3  million) first round of funding yesterday led by Endeavour Vision and IDinvest Partners (formerly AGF Private Equity) to put toward an aggressive growth strategy that relies heavily on marketing and regional branches.

Kobojo VP product and strategy Vincent Vergonjeanne tells us in an interview that roughly half of the funding will go toward ad spend and marketing efforts on Facebook. “It could be more,” he says. “We want to accelerate [growth]. We would love to spend the entire [amount] on marketing, but there are other plans.”

Those “other plans” include opening new branches of Kobojo in international territories, the first of which is in Spain. The French developer wants to take a more intimate approach to localizing its games library in foreign territories. Rather than just translating the words within Kobojo games to a region’s local language, Vergonjeanne tells us that the regional branches will run the community management aspect of the game for its region, as well implementing region-specific game promotions or features.

For example, there is an upcoming music festival in France that Kobojo plans to run in-game events around in the coming weeks that will only be visible to players in France. Vergonjeanne wants similar events to run in other regions with close supervision from the regional branch teams of community managers, designers, and artists.

The other plan that Kobojo also plans to spend some of its funding on is a proprietary technology that enables the developer to run its games continuously between Facebook and mobile or tablet platforms. Many social game developers have struggled to accomplish connection between their Facebook games and mobile components of those games, but limitations on technology and Apple’s approvals process have made that difficult. Kobojo has a piece of technology that will allow the developer to port all of its games, starting with the most recently released PyramidVille, to mobile and keep them updated as consistently as its Facebook component.

Kobojo is already hiring for its new branches. Its newest game, PyramidVille, hit Facebook in late January and currently enjoys 1.2 million monthly active users and 248,000 daily active users, according to our social game traffic tracking service, AppData.

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Kabam Considers a Big New Funding Round, Following Success of Facebook Strategy Games

Although it announced a $30 million third round of funding in January, Kabam is talking to investors about adding significantly more money to its bank account. It is looking to raise between $50 million and $75 million, according to two sources we’ve spoken with, following a quiet but lucrative 2010 for the company.

After initially building a network of applications for fans of sports and television shows, Kabam transitioned in 2009 to focus on social games for serious gamers. Its initial foray into this type of application, Kingdoms of Camelot, has according to industry sources generated significant revenue for the company despite having relatively low usage numbers. At its peak, the game had 933,000 daily active users and 6.57 million monthly active users; it has been declining in recent months, due to Kabam’s focus on newer games like Glory of Rome and Dragons of Atlantis. Still, the game has largely powered Kabam’s recent revenue growth, which many in the industry believe is in the tens of millions of dollars.

The company, for its part, isn’t commenting on this article.

But why would the company want to raise even more money, after just announcing this last round?

First, the $30 million was actually raised in 2010, so a new round wouldn’t follow as closely on the prior one as it might appear.

Second, Kabam has been investing heavily in its other games. As you can see in the chart, via AppData, our tracking service for the top apps on Facebook, the developer is getting at least decent growth from some of them. Zynga may have led social gaming to the mass market but Kabam’s goal is to take social gaming back to hardcore players. A new round could help it cement its lead in this area, even as most larger developers continue to focus on tried-and-true varieties of social games, like simulations.

Third, the company still has some work to do in adapting to Facebook’s latest platform changes. It is still moving over to Credits, Facebook’s mandatory paid virtual currency. And, like many other developers, it is trying to optimize its marketing and advertising efforts after Facebook pared down communication channels last year but didn’t introduce significant new ones. Engaging and monetizing users on Facebook has become more costly than last year.

The new funding, if it happens, would follow a total of nearly $40 million raised over three rounds from Canaan Partners, Betfair, Redpoint Ventures and Intel Capital.

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Facebook Ecommerce Storefront Provider 8thBridge Takes $10 Million in Funding

Social commerce platform 8thBridge has taken $10 million in a second round of funding led by Trident Capital. The money will go towards developing an interest-based product recommendation engine and a brand evangelist rewards program within its StoreCast Facebook ecommerce app.

8thBridge, formerly Alvenda, was an early entrant into the Facebook ecommerce space, creating stores for 1-800-Flowers.com and Delta Air Lines. Other clients now include Hallmark, Land’s End, mark by Avon, and Brooks Brothers. The company previously received $5 million in a first round of funding in January 2010 from Split Rock Partners, a firm that also joined in the latest round.

The company currently offer storefronts which can be embedded in tabs on Facebook Pages and within news feed stories. This in-stream shopping has great potential because a single brand evangelist can enable all their friends to make purchases.

Along with recommendations and rewards programs, 8thBridge will use the funding to work on a social promotions system that might allow users to gain discounts if they can get their friends to purchase as well. Currently some of 8thBridge’s storefronts load as canvas apps, opposed to offering a shopping experience directly from a Page tab, which it may seek to change to reduce friction.

The funding continues the trend of companies aggressively pursuing the Facebook ecommerce solutions market. Storefront services, rewards program, and Facebook Connect-powered shopping sites are all rapidly proliferating. Storefronts including 8thBridge looking to succeed will need to offer simple onboarding and product catalog importing, intuitive checkout flows, deep social sharing options, and innovative promotions. Trident Capital and Split Rock’s investment should help 8thBridge concentrate enough resources on these problems.

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How to get funding for your project (Kickstarter and 8 Bit Funding tips)

I’m currently backing couple of projects through Kickstarter and I must say it feels good. From currently backed projects, the Mojang’s story is something where I actually might catch a thing or two professionally, and GameTunnel was the place I loved to go and hope to see it resurrected (or somehow merged with IGM).

Even though the sums I’ve given have been small, together with other backers they make decent sums. It gives me a pretty good feeling knowing that I’m contributing to the scene in this way too.

Here’s some of my tips for getting funding:

Person/story behind the project is more important than the project: We all have cool game ideas and everybody knows *their* game idea is the best one. Trying to convince others to support your cool game idea is tough… unless you find a good angle. Check the projects I’ve backed. Mojang’s story is amazing and they want to share their success story. Saving Game Tunnel (“the old famous indie site wants to raise from the grave”) makes a catchy story. If you are interesting person, or have interesting story to tell… then share it. The product in itself is not that interesting. Provide enough of options to choose from: You can have $10 and $100 and even $10 000 options (and everything between… and beyond) and this gives possibility for people to choose how much they want to donate. On each level, give something more. Make the offers better and better on each level. Give physical stuff: if your game can offer something physical then consider arranging giving it. It can be a physical copy of a magazine or creeper toy… whatever it is, consider giving one to people who select higher levels of funding. Give credit & thanks: consider giving credits or putting people’s names in the finished product. My name will be on that Mojang story movie (yippee!) and it’s just great. Give advertising: If you have a website, consider giving advertising for people who support. Advertising can be anything from “thank you blog post for all people” to “banner ads” or “reviews about your product” and so on. In the indie scene, indies look opportunities to get more publicity and if you can help them, they just might take the bait.

Bonus tip: “consider the payment method”
There are several places that offer funding system for your products and consider the different options before choosing one to go with. Here’s two funding places:

Kickstarter (accepts Amazon only, they take 5% of the funds raised – if 100% funded) 8 bit funding (accepts Paypal, they take 5% of the funds received after paypal charge, if at least 50% funded)

Please notice that I have used Kickstarter just twice and haven’t yet received my stuff (since projects aren’t completed yet), so I don’t know how trustworthy or reliable these systems are. People seem to use them, so I’ve taken the chance. When it comes to money, it’s up to you to check this.

Also, notice that since 8 bit funding accepts Paypal, for some people (such as me) it might be more likely to donate money from my Paypal account rather than my credit card (maybe that’s just me).

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 6th, 2011 at 7:47 am and is filed under Game Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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On Friends, Family and Funding

It’s hard to believe it’s been only just over 9 months from the launch of Applifier on April 25th 2010. I haven’t blogged at all during that time as I simply haven’t had the time or energy for it.

Mark Suster recently wrote an excellent article on the rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship. I’ve been through that rollercoaster ride amped up with a few jet engines strapped to my back in those nine months. When we launched Applifier together with fellow social game publishers, I had no idea that the idea would grow to became a successful service reaching over tens of millions monthly active users. I was only trying to survive.

Everyplay (as our company was known then) was at the brink of death with a only a few months of cashflow left. Out of that desperation came the idea to try cross-promotion across small and medium sized publishers. It was the opportune time and we executed. But it would have not worked without the trust and support of our launch members. I’m incredibly thankful for their support, guidance and help.

Thank you Nabeel, Daniel, Raph, Jason, Keith, James, Stan, Moo, Luke, Rex, Magnus and Johan.

Applifier was founded to work for publishers. It is a privilege to work for so many great companies and see their games succeed.

Come mid-summer 2010 we were running on fumes. Money was nearly gone. Applifier was taking off like a rocket. Kamu Town, our game, languished. I had an obvious, but a very difficult decision to make. The vision I had crafted and promised to our team had not realized. We weren’t going to make it with games. The hardest day arrived when I had to face the facts, stop all game development and layoff good friends from the company. We ended up drinking and being merry the same night and parted ways with a ton of respect for everybody. I didn’t stop working for my former employees until I found them new employment at great companies like Rovio and Digital Chocolate. Personally one of the coolest things that Applifier has made possible is that I was able recruit back one of the guys I had had to lay off. Makes me smile.

Thank you Matti, Jussi and Pekka for believing in my vision and going the extra mile. It was a privilege to work on Kamu Town with you.

At the same time Applifier was growing explosively, but were a total nobody. An unknown, obscure Finnish startup trying to raise money in the Valley and not even knowing who to talk to. I had some ideas of investors I should try and reach, but I didn’t know them. Fortunately many great friends believed in us and put their reputation on the line to introduce us to the right people.

Thank you Paul, Wili, Jyri, Brett, Frank, Pekka, Josh, Taneli, Jukka.

Those warm intros opened the doors and our traction kept the doors open. We were up to around 30M MAU in reach in just a few months, but at the same also nearly out of cash. Applifier was delivering great results to its publishers, so our graphs continued to go up and to the right. If anything, that moves things forward in a funding round. It sounds cliché, but it is absolutely true.

The saying is that a Valley investor won’t invest into a company to whose office he can’t drive to. To my surprise I found that to be untrue. We pitched nearly 40 seed investors and only one outright turned us down because we aren’t a Delaware corporation. Everybody else was ok as long as the legal & tax impact of investing into Finland were known and the CEO would move over to the valley. (yes, that’s were I’m headed)

Traction was definitely the thing that helped investor to get over the “Where in the world is Finland?” issue. The cross-promo model worked and our publishers got great results from using Applifier. The technology worked extremely well too, but only because Matti and Jalmari, our technical co-founders, totally outdelivered re-writing Applifier’s systems several times over and working days and nights to keep up with the amazing load.

Thank you Matti and Jalmari. I couldn’t have found more competent and outstanding technical co-founders.

We were fortunate to meet several great investors, many of whom went out of their way to help us. The decision who to bring on board was not a trivial one. We were “getting married”, but unlike a marriage, there would be no option for a divorce. In the end our decision came down to choosing investors who were entrepreneurs themselves and whose own investors were entrepreneurs.

It’s great to have MHS Capital, PROfounders and Lifeline on board. These seed funds’ own investors are all successful entrepreneurs. It’s been an absolute privilege for me to talk with Ali Partovi (who backs MHS Capital), one of the founders of Link Exchange, who were the true pioneers of the cross-promotion model in the pre-Google days. So much in common with the businesses even if they are separated by over 15 years. Jyri, David and Lars are all successful entrepreneurs with huge domain expertise. Mark at MHS Capital, Sean & Rogan at PROfounders, Petteri, Timo, Jarkko and Ilkka at Lifeline all think and act like entrepreneurs.

Tekes, the Finnish funding agency for technology and innovation, has supported our R&D efforts since day 1. We are thrilled to join their Young Innovative Companies and show that fast growth, international startups can be created in Finland just as well as anywhere in the world.

Thank you Mark, Sean, Rogan, Jyri, David, Lars and Pauli for backing our vision.

While I was galloping around the world and obsessing over Applifier’s offering, the one person that kept things going at Applifier HQ and provided a steady hand to everything was Pekka, our fourth co-founder. Pekka and I go ways back as we’ve together run ASSEMBLY the largest Finnish computer festival since early 1990s.

Thank you Pekka, for being a friend and a co-founder for close to 20 years now.

During the fall of 2010 we’ve built up our team and have had incredible success in recruiting awesome folks whose work is now starting show through our feature launches like retargeting, our new network for web games and several cool things that will launch in the near future.

Thank you Teemu, AT, Antti, Garo, Pekka, Tuomas, Mika, Eemu, Juho and Reina.

This rollercoaster ride has been a thrill, but combining it with a family of two young kids makes for a busier life than I could have ever imagined. The understanding, support and love my wife Eija has given me over these months is beyond words. That she would resign her own job and relocate to a foreign country that she has never been to is simply amazing and humbling to me.

Thank you Eija for your love and support.

I’m privileged to be on this journey and work with so many talented people, work for awesome publishers and have the advice and support of people I respect.

Applifier is the creation of everybody involved. Thank you.

Explore posts in the same categories: business This entry was posted on February 2, 2011 at 23:26 and is filed under business. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

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Social Gaming Roundup: New Zynga Funding, SNAP, New Social Gaming Entrants and More

New Zynga Funding — A number of financial publications reported this week that Zynga is raising a large new round of funding. The Wall Street Journal kicked things off on Monday citing sources saying the company is looking to raise around $250 million at a valuation of between $7 billion and $9 billion, following profit of $400 million and total revenue of $850 million last year. Bloomberg then reported that the valuation could be $10 billion, from T. Rowe Price, and Fidelity Investments. Then All Things D and The New York Times reported yesterday that Zynga is finalizing a $500 million round worth $10 billion from those investors and others; the latter publication said the company is considering an initial public offering as soon as 2012, according to sources.

SNAP Interactive Releases Curious Valentine’s Numbers — SNAP Interactive announced some numbers regarding Valentine’s Day virtual items late last week. Based on their Facebook connected AreYouInterested.com, the holiday marked a significant spike in virtual gifting with over 100% more Valentine’s style virtual gifts being purchased in the past month, over the prior, and a 15% increase overall.

Tribeca Film Institute & Ford Foundation Partner to Support New Media — The Tribeca Film Institue and the Ford Foundation‘s JustFilms initiative have entered a partnership and launched the Tribeca Film Institue New Media Fund. The $750,000 fund is said to provide support and funding to film projects that incorporate newer media platforms including video games, mobile apps, social networks, and micro-blogging.

Big Fish Games to Close Treasure Quest — According to Worlds in Motion, Big Fish Games is closing its Facebook title Treasure Quest on March 15th. The game marked the casual developer’s first venture into the social gaming market, but currently only garners around 48,000 MAU.

Nexon Getting into Social & Mobile Games — MapleStory developer, Nexon, is looking to move into making social games for Facebook as well as for mobile, says VentureBeat. In order to differentiate itself, Nexon is looking to hook players through game play that connects users with an online community.

Game Closure Launches Cross-Platform Multiplayer App — According to TechCrunch, Game Closure has launched a new SDK that will allow developers to easily create, host, and deploy HTML5-based, cross-platform multiplayer games. Shown at SSE Labs‘ Demo Day at AOL, the SDK is compatible across iOS, Android, and Facebook apps.

Richard Garriott Plans to Beat Zynga — Richard Garriott and his new startup, Portalarium, is set to release their first title in about a month, and says he’s planning to beat out Zynga, says VentureBeat. Though he has released no specific details about the game, it is noted that it will be released on Facebook, Hi5, and other such networks and will not be a “plagiarized” concept; referring to some of Zynga’s past games.

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