It’s no secret that many social gaming companies are looking to become less dependent on Facebook as a centralized platform for games. Zynga just announced its first, direct to consumer, independent gaming platform. Today, social gaming company CrowdStar has unveiling its social games strategy, called Project Trident, to help create a global, mobile platform and franchises, as well as Facebook titles.
It’s important to note that CrowdStar isn’t fleeing the Facebook platform all together, but merely looking to diversify its interests. Through Project Trident, CrowdStar is focusing on creating social gaming franchises across Facebook, global and mobile platforms.
In terms of global reach, CrowdStar announcing deals to bring its Girl franchise to Asia. The company is partnering with Korea’s NHN subsidiary, NHN Japan, to bring It Girl to Japan. Korea and China are also on the radar for CrowdStar as the company is targeting the market of 1 billion gamers in Asia. In Q4 alone, the company is planning to introduce five game launches of It Girl and Top Girl across five different social networks in Asia.
Peter Relan, CEO of CrowdStar, says that Facebook is a great platform to start building a game on (the company plans to launch a new Facebook game this weekend) but the social graph on mobile is fundamentally different. And CrowdStar is focused on changing the social graph interactions and game design to work for mobile game play. The company’s iOS game title Top Girl has already seen over 4 million downloads in four months, and has become one of the top-grossing games on iOS
Relan says that last year, CrowdStar’s entire revenue came from Facebook. And this year 50 percent is from mobile, and global will soon factor in as a revenue stream too. The gaming company is planning for 8 game launches in Q4 across Facebook, mobile and global, which is more than all of the titles launched last year.
CrowdStar just raised $23 million led by Intel Capital, Time Warner Investments with participation from China’s The9 and media mogul Aviv Nevo’s NVInvestments.