While some may still cringe at the word (and its overuse), gamification is reaching the tipping point. As Mayfield Fund Managing Director Tim Chang recently wrote in a must-read post, gamification is now moving beyond its early adopting verticals like media and fitness and is no longer content to just play in the realm of consumers and end users. It’s headed to enterprise next.
Badgeville’s vision of a web and business experience being re-shaped by game dynamics is not only being validated by the media, but by investors, too. Earlier this month, mobile gamification startup SessionM raised $20 million from Charles River Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others. And today, Badgeville is leap-frogging SessionM, announcing that it has closed a badge-worthy $25 million round of series C financing. → Read More
Another funding announcement that underscores what big business kids’ and educational apps can be. Mindshapes, a UK-based developer of interactive learning apps, has picked up a $4 million round of funding led by Index Ventures, with Richmond Park Partners and existing investors also participating.
The news caps off an eventful couple of weeks for Mindshapes. Earlier in the month, it had launched a flagship app, Magic Town, which Mindshapes calls the first virtual world based on picture book characters. Magic Town, a highly visual app, incorporates content licensed from Hachette Group, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Group, among others, into e-learning tasks. Mindshapes is ramping up content on Magic Town quickly: it currently contains content from 70 popular picture books but aims to have 200 titles in there by year’s end.
→ Read More
Sponsored Ads
Last we heard from Game Closure, the young startup had just turned down offers from Zynga and Facebook on its way to a $12 million raise from Highland Capital, Greylock, Benchmark, General Catalyst, and more. Even in spite of $100 million-plus offers, Game Closure CEO Michael Carter tells us that the startup is not eager to sell — not now, and not in the future. Yet, stealing high-placed executives at the big gaming companies? Not a problem.
Today, Game Closure, which is building a game development environment and SDK that makes it easy for developers to create, host, and deploy HTML5, cross-platform, multiplayer games, is announcing that it has poached Laurent Desegur away from Zynga, making the engineer and executive VP of Mobile Engineering. Until recently, Desegur had been CTO of Zynga Mobile, on top of being a veteran of Netflix, Big Fish Games, Amazon, Apple, and EA — to name a few. → Read More
Evo.
It’s one of the few HTC/Sprint models to make a splash in the mobile ocean, and after a brief stay at U.S. customs, the latest iteration should do the same.
The Evo 4G LTE is the most powerful Evo to date, with a 4.7-inch 720p display, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, and 1GB of RAM under the hood. But these specs are in no way novel, which means that quite a bit comes down to HTC’s software offerings and design language. → Read More
We first met the folks from Lamp Lighter at an NYC office hours session, and just as we expected, their iPad app Trivia Party is doing swimmingly in the App Store.
After a week of availability, the app has already made its way into the Top 100 zone within the trivia category, and tallied more than 10,000 questions answered. → Read More
Nintendo unveiled the tablet-centric Wii U at last year’s E3. At the time the company was clear that it was a working name. A report earlier this year stated that Nintendo was exploring other options. E3 kicks off next week and it seems increasingly likely that Nintendo is sticking with the unusual moniker.
First off, Nintendo just launched a Wii U Facebook campaign complete with an intro video with Reggie Fils-Aime welcoming guests to the Wii U page. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Wii U logo is now on Nintendo’s press site. → Read More
Sponsored Ads
According to a very short, very rumor-filled VG24/7 piece, Sony is looking at adding cloud-enabled gaming to the PlayStation line, presumably in the form of an Onlive or Gaikai partnership.
Given that we won’t see much new this year at E3 – aside for official Wii U availability and perhaps (just perhaps) whispers of next gen Sony and Microsoft consoles, this bit of news could carry the show. The Vita is powerful, to be sure, but it’s hardly nailing it in terms of game availability and to be able to play a game on the handheld and then pop over to the console is pretty compelling. Presumably the console can also act as a conduit for a definitively more interesting gaming experience. → Read More
If you’re an older gamer, you will remember the holy trinity of Sierra RPGs – King’s Quest, Space Quest, and Police Quest. All three of these games used something called “imagination” and “storytelling” to immerse early gamers in an Ad Lib sound card-induced gaming coma.
Now you can relive those heady days with a new game by the makers of Space Quest, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe (aka “The Two Guys from Andromeda”). Their new game, called SpaceVenture, is a refresh of the old Sierra series and promises spills, chills, and horrible jokes. It’s getting funded on Kickstarter as we speak.
→ Read More
Diversification is the key to longevity. With that likely in mind, GameStop just announced widespread availability of Android tablets throughout its chain of retail stores. This comes after a 200 store trial that started last October.
These aren’t ordinary Android tablets, though. GameStop is pre-loading the Samsung, Asus, Acer, and Toshiba with extra gaming titles such as Sonic CD, Riptide, the Kongregate Arcade app and a free issue of GameStop’s gaming mag, Game Informer. Thanks to these extras and with prices that are inline with other stores, GameStop actually has a chance to capture a bit of the tablet market. → Read More
Today brings another entrant into the social gambling space with RocketFrog, which is setting out to bring casino entertainment to Facebook with the launch of a free-to-play online casino that offers players the chance to win real prizes. Traditionally, online casino players participate in the casino gaming experience recreationally, with the rewards being the opportunity to socialize with friends or earn a few virtual badges.
So, RocketFrog wants to change this by leveraging the Facebook platform — where all of your friends are already — to create social tournaments, where players can interact and compete against their friends to win real prizes, not just accumulate points on leaderboards or vie for meaningless status increases. → Read More
A Wiimote turned on its side makes for a perfectly serviceable controller when plowing through retro games from the Wii Shop Channel, and the Classic Controller isn’t bad either, but I wouldn’t call either of them an ideal solution.
On the other hand, ThinkGeek’s new Super Famicom controller for the Wii manages to come pretty damned close, especially if you’re a gamer who spends your time steeped in the past. → Read More
Zynga and American Express are back together again in a new deal that will give prepaid card carriers ways to earn extra Farm Cash.
American Express, which has long been known for catering to high-end consumers, is moving downmarket. They’ve got a new platform called Serve, which is kind of a catchall service that supports many payment methods from traditional plastic cards with magnetic stripes to NFC to QR codes to basic online payments. The partnership with Zynga is meant to on-board new Amex customers and could give the credit card company the so-called FarmVille demographic.
“Zynga has a very large customer base,” said David Messenger, American Express’ executive vice president of enterprise growth. “This partnership isn’t for existing credit and charge card customers. It’s about trying to appeal to a new segment. These customers may be Millennials. They may be somewhat underserved in terms of banking. They may only use debit, cash and check.” → Read More
King.com, the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA’s Sims Social and opening a new game development studio in London. The company just hired Catharina Mallet away from EA to lead the new studio, which should have 40 people by year-end.
King.com, which started in Sweden and hasn’t taken outside funding since raising $43 million seven years ago, is one of two European gaming companies that have made a serious run on the Facebook platform in the last year. While Zynga has seen its revenue growth slow and other longtime Facebook developers like Crowdstar and Funzio have mostly moved onto mobile games, both King.com and Germany’s Wooga have both climbed up the developer leaderboards.
King.com has beat out EA and more recently, Wooga, for the #2 spot among game developers in terms of daily active users on Facebook, according to AppData. The number of game sessions has also blown up by tenfold to 3 billion per month, from 300 million a year ago.
→ Read More
GameStop is hurting. Same store sales fell 5%-11% and revenue was down 17% to $2 billion. Profit fell to $72.5 million. Arguably, those are still huge numbers and presumably a new console refresh should push the company out of the doldrums. But what the company has just launched – a new MVNO called GameStop Mobile – is almost inexplicable.
GameStop Mobile is, in short, an unlimited data and voice offering for $55 a month (down to $20 a month for pay-as-you-go plans.) Gamestop is just selling SIM cards and service and is running on AT&T’s network with some notable dead spots.
→ Read More
For some inexplicable reason, Nintendo and Toyota have teamed up to turn the Nintendo DS into a navigational remote control, thereby allowing drivers (although I hope passengers do most of the fiddling) to set their routes using their game consoles.
The service, called Kuruma de DS lets you see map and destination info as well as tour information as you drive through town. The service slightly gamifies the experience by adding a POI saving option. → Read More
Ogmento is a gaming company dedicated to the creation of high-quality augmented reality games. Although AR games aren’t that rare – the 3DS does a few quite well and there are a number available on mobile phones – Ogmento is focusing on higher-end experiences. The demo above shows how they’re able to track targets in real time and, with a few button presses, have a tank fire into a crowd of luminaries including Will Wright and Bruce Sterling.
The company currently sells an AR game called NBA: King of the Court. The tank game, above, is a prototype. → Read More
If you’ve ever wanted to swing a magic wand around and make things happen (besides encouraging the cool kids to give you a swirly, that is), here’s your chance. A new game on Kickstarter called Incantor promises some real-live olde timey majicke fun for your iPhone.
Built by a Rhode Island company, Movable Code, the game will allow you to cast spells and plan tactics by waving your wand around. The wand is actually a motion control device with haptic feedback and you can “shape” spells in the air to cast them. You can also use the wand to lock onto targets on the screen. → Read More
Zynga has done a small acquisition of Wild Needle, a female-focused casual games company that was backed by Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson.
Wild Needle was raising funding back in late 2010 to build casual, mobile games for women and closed a round with Thompson and Shasta Ventures. They didn’t release their first title until more than a year later in March (which is a pretty long time to be building a casual, freemium game). It was called Shoptown Hero and it looks like it lasted in the store for about a month before they pulled it two weeks ago (see chart below). → Read More
Very rarely do we see gaming startups launch on the rather limited platform of SMS. Mobile games are all about the graphics, the functionality, and the ability to leverage the very best of technology through an app. But StrayBoots, a real-world scavenger hunt via text, has managed to generate $200,000 in revenue over the past 12 months, with nearly 50,000 paying customers.
Oh, and did I mention that it’s all through SMS? → Read More
I have been active in the field of gamification for the past couple of years, working with companies like Badgeville, HealthTap, Gigya, Basis and others on leveraging game mechanics for end user behavior measurement, scoring and shaping. Last week, I participated on an investor panel of at VatorSplash’s Gamification Summit and the group shared several noteworthy points: → Read More
Sponsored Ads
San Francisco, CA
