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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New Facebook platform industry hires: Ifeelgoods, Scale Venture Partners, Nanigans, Strutta, more

Ifeelgoods hired an SVP of sales, Scale Venture Partners hired a new executive-in-residence, Nanigans brought on a technical advisor and Strutta has a new director of marketing, among other notable hires made this week at Facebook platform companies.

If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we’ll get it into our next post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes either from the companies themselves or from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s list of hires:

Ifeelgoods

Tyler Hoffman, Senior Vice President of Sales – former managing director of commerce sales at Google

Scale Venture Partners

Eric Tilenius, Executive-in-Residence – former general manager at Zynga.

Nanigans

David C. Parkes, Technical Advisor – also works as a professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.

Strutta

Joeline Hackman, Director of Marketing.

Vitrue

Elisha Phoenix, Visual/UX Designer – former designer at Razorfish.

AdParlor

Mike Empey, Sales Engineer – former software development support specialist at Research In Motion.

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

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The Hunger Games Adventures fails to venture out of closed beta

We won't even joke about it: You already know that The Hunger Games opened in theaters this weekend. You might also know that the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins's famous novel is the third biggest opening weekend in box office history. And yet developer Funtactix's The Hunger Games Adventures for Facebook is yet to be found outside of closed beta.

With such an impressive opening weekend and a timely mobile game assembled by a dream team of developers, it's bewildering, frankly. The branded social game, expected to launch on March 23, was set to be Funtactix's largest release yet and even promised The Hunger Games fans a look at the first-ever map of Panem. Regardless of how well the game played, at least it had that tidbit to draw fans of the books in with.

But here we are, with only a select few players able to play the closed beta test of The Hunger Games Adventures. As Gamezebo points out, the movie's biggest buzz period is well behind us with opening weekend. This understandably raises plenty of questions. Does the game have technical issues? Has beta players' feedback stopped Funtactix from showing the game to the world? Who knows, but hopefully for both fans' and Funtactix's sake this delay doesn't last much longer.

Have you been patiently waiting for The Hunger Games Adventures? What do you think is the holdup? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

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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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