Draw Something, the game that could do no wrong now seems like it can do little right, at least according to the blogosphere. There’s been a string of stories from virtually everyone saying that the OMGPOP acquisition is “haunting” Zynga because Draw Something’s daily active usage is down to 9.1 million daily active users from its peak of 14.6 million daily active users.
It’s funny how the press turns (and we know this too well). On the day we broke the story that Zynga was about to buy OMGPOP for what turned out to be $180 million, Business Insider said that our rumored price range was way too low. When the company sold, they then wrote a story citing Flurry’s CEO that OMGPOP had left $800 million on the table. → Read More
A little footnote — no, actually, a big footnote — to Rovio’s news earlier this week that revenues had increased by more than tenfold in 2011: the games developer says that its Angry Birds games have now passed the one billion download mark.
Finland-based Rovio notes that this is taking into account the full range of games, including the original Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, and the newest, Angry Birds Space.
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Three months after launching the PS Vita is still a hard sale. There simply isn’t a killer title yet. Uncharted: Golden Abyss is boring, the racing games fall flat, and the best game so far, Ninja Gaiden, is tepid at best. Worst yet, several of the Vita’s relatively strong titles are simply ports of smartphone games. In the age of $5 iPad games, spending $50 on a port is downright ludicrous.
Sackboy and LittleBigPlanet might be the ace the the PS Vita so desperately need. And it’s about to hit beta. → Read More
San Francisco-based mobile gaming startup Funzio had just come off making more than $5 million in sales per month when it sold to Japan’s GREE for $210 million last week. Profits may be another story, and there’s less visibility into that. But Funzio had to decide between raising additional funding or selling at the time the deal happened.
The numbers were revealed in GREE’s earnings statement today. Funzio’s acquisition comes at a very fascinating time for GREE, a $4.8 billion mobile gaming company from Japan. Like Zynga in the U.S., GREE and its archrival DeNA are part of a younger vanguard of freemium gaming companies that have found success in their home market of Japan.
But there are threats on the horizon. GREE’s shares were absolutely slaughtered on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Monday. The company’s shares fell a record 23 percent after the Japanese government said it was investigating the legality of various game mechanics in the social gaming industry. → Read More
Arjun Sethi, who was the CEO of early social game developer LOLapps, has landed at Chamath Palihapitiya’s venture fund The Social+Capital Partnership as an entrepreneur in residence. It’s a soft landing after his company’s merger with social games publisher 6Waves didn’t go quite as planned.
Lolapps, the Facebook game developer behind Ravenwood Fair, was merged with publisher 6waves last July. They then took about $35 million in funding from Insight Venture Partners and South Korean gaming giant Nexon. → Read More
Back in November, Ustream Co-founder and longtime CEO John Ham stepped down from the company he had helped found four and a half years earlier. His co-founder, Brad Hunstable, took the reins in his place. Ham continues to serve as chairman of Ustream’s board of directors and as an advisor to the company, but as Jason reported, his stepping down in November was an acknowledgement of the Entrepreneurial Call.
At the time, Ham was tight-lipped about the particulars of his new venture, which remains true today, as the startup is in double-secret stealth mode. However, Ham is ready to reveal a few more details, including his partner. The Ustream co-founder has teamed up with Keith Lee, the co-founder of venture-backed, location-based mobile app developer Booyah. → Read More
Zynga is taking yet another step away from its long line of casual sim “-Ville” games today with the launch of Bubble Safari. It’s an arcade game where a monkey named “Bubbles” has to shoot down pieces of fruit hanging above him to save his friends from poachers. If he matches several of the same kinds of fruit in a row, they’ll tumble down and get sorted into baskets by hummingbirds.
These shooter games are not new to the Facebook platform. With the rapid rise of Europe’s King.com and Germany’s Wooga on the back of games like Bubble Witch Saga and Bubble Island, it’s not surprising that Zynga would eventually launch its own take on the genre. → Read More
EA’s big shift toward treating games as services instead of packaged goods is going to mean restructuring this year.
Chief executive John Riccitiello said in today’s earnings call that there will be some layoffs as the company increases production of online, mobile, and social games. While EA beat earnings estimates for the quarter ending in March, its shares fell in after-hours trading by as much as 9.5 percent. The company has slipped nearly 20 percent since its last earnings call in February.
EA said in the statement that the move was being launched “to align the company’s cost structure with its ongoing digital transformation.” For some quick history: About a month ago, Derek Anderson reported that EA would be laying off 500+ employees, which came on the heels of its big Popcap acquisition, the departure of its CFO, and the ignominious title of being named “the worst company in America,” according to The Consumerist. → Read More
EA shares slipped 9.5 percent in after-hours trading to $13.70 as the company said it expected losses of 40 to 45 cents a share for the next quarter. It said it expects to make $4.3 billion for the year and will earn $1.05 to 1.20, on a non-GAAP basis.
Another piece of data that might have dragged down performance were subscriber numbers for Star Wars: The Old Republic, the title that was going to going to help it take market share away from World of Warcraft. EA said it had 1.3 million active subscribers, compared to the 1.7 million subscriber figure that the company had shared before
On the positive side, EA beat earnings estimates for the quarter ending in March with $977 million in total net revenue on a non-GAAP basis. Analysts had expected net revenue of $959.6 million or 17 cents a share. One other positive is that digital revenue continues to creep up as a share of EA’s overall earnings as the company transitions away from selling games like packaged, consumer goods. Digital revenue was nearly double was it was a year ago at $419 million. → Read More
While it seems like mobile gaming companies are getting acquired left and right this spring, there are still plenty that are staying independent and doing just fine.
Storm8, which is totally bootstrapped and was founded by Facebook alums, is one of them. The Redwood Shores-based company is saying that it has passed 300 million downloads and that its network of games reaches 100 million devices. CEO Perry Tam believes this means they reach 1 out of every 5 iOS and Android users (assuming 500 million devices sold or activated to date, which is pretty consistent with the numbers Google and Apple have shared so far). Storm8 declined to share anything about its daily active usage numbers.
“The company is profitable and we can stand on our own feet and sustain growth,” said chief executive Perry Tam in an interview. He plans to double Storm8′s headcount to 240 people by year-end.
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We all know what a wild success the Angry Birds franchise has been for Rovio, with the best-selling mobile games spawning cookbooks, toys and much more besides. Today the company revealed just what kind of an impact that has had on its bottom line for its really Big Year.
The company today issued a statement that noted that the company made $106.3 million (€75.4m) in revenue in 2011, with earnings before tax at $67.6 million (€48m) — with 30 percent of that coming from its merchandising and licensing activities. Monthly active users of the app are now at 200 million, with 648 million games downloaded in total.
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Japanese gaming giant GREE just acquired mid-core, mobile game developer Funzio for $210 million in an all-cash deal that should boost its ability to build games for Western audiences. Funzio is behind Crime City, Modern War and Kingdom Age, which are graphical RPGs that have had more than 20 million downloads on Apple’s iOS, Android or Facebook platforms.
I had heard a few weeks back that Funzio was in a fundraising process at a $350 million post-money valuation and had also been loosely talking to various buyers in an auction-style process. Apparently, the fundraising efforts helped tip Funzio into a sale, but maybe not at the valuation I had originally heard about. Still, $210 million is not bad at all, considering that the company had raised about $20 million to date from IDG Ventures and Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson. For comparison, Draw Something-maker OMGPOP went to Zynga for $180 million in cash plus an undisclosed earnout.
Why did GREE buy Funzio? GREE is a multi-billion dollar mobile gaming company from Japan that is trying to break into Western markets. Its profit margins put Zynga to shame, but the company is running out of room to grow as its home country becomes saturated. → Read More
The education market — as Apple and others have noticed — represents a huge mobile opportunity, and today sees the launch of an app that plays on that potential, with added gamification and social twists. PlaySay, a “social language learning” startup, today debuts a free, new Spanish/English iPhone app — along with a licensing deal with HarperCollins and an additional $250,000 in funding, taking total backing in the company up to $820,000.
We first heard about PlaySay last year, when it launched at the TC Disrupt conference as a Facebook app that let users learn languages through Facebook’s own content translated into your foreign language of choice: “Your Facebook friends are your new classmates. Check ins, status updates and pictures are your course materials,” founder Ryan Meinzer said at the time. The new iPhone app plays on a similar idea, except that it uses PlaySay’s own platform as the basis of the language learning. → Read More
ifeelgoods has a brilliant idea — letting you earn Facebook Credits for ecommerce purchases or following a brand on Twitter — but now it has to convince big companies and shopping sites to adopt its tech. That’s why it’s hired former Google Managing Director of Commerce Sales and leader of PayPal’s enterprise sales team Tyler Hoffman to be its new Senior Vice President of Sales.
ifeelgoods is starting to snowball, as CEO Michael Amar says 92% of customers returning to ifeelgoods and increasing their budget by 250%. Of my years in tech, this is one of the most promising startups I’ve seen. Because virtual currency is so cheap to distribute and is highly valued by some consumers, ifeelgoods could become a big disruptive force in how businesses acquire customers. → Read More
For game developers who thought about applying for the $100,000 Build Fund from rewards network Kiip but didn’t get around to it yet — good news! The deadline has been extended from today until May 30. And for those of you who weren’t planning to apply, well, the company is adding some features to the fund that may entice you.
The goal is to encourage the creation of games that incorporate Kiip’s reward programs in their initial designs (rather than adding them later). Twenty developers are supposed to receive $5,000 in cash (adding up to $100,000 in all) — it’s not a huge amount of funding, but CEO Brian Wong says it could make a real difference to an independent developer.
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Want a zombie on your underwear? Good, because soon, you will have that opportunity. Today, there comes more proof that mobile gaming is the entertainment franchise opp of the future as EA-owned PopCap, makers of Plants vs. Zombies and the “Bejeweled” series of games, announced a number of new partnership deals that will see its game brands turned into merchandise – much like Rovio’s Angry Birds has already done to great success. The company has six new partnerships on tap which will see its properties featured as everything from plush toys to branded headphones. And yeah, boxers, too.
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If you spent any time in high school thinking about ley lines and bio-implants, you were probably a Shadowrun player. The game, which petered out after a disastrous run as a PC/Xbox game in 2007, brought the high-tech of William Gibson to the magical realms of Mr. Gygax. It was, in short, pretty cool.
A Kickstarter project aims to bring back all that fun in video game form, adding lots of what you missed about Shadowrun back to the PC. This new version will be a RPG involving the Shadowrun world complete with various character types – elves, samurai, humans – and, although this is discouraged, deals with dragons. $15 gets you a copy of the game while $60 gets you a t-shirt and some in-game perks. → Read More
In another sign that something fundamental is changing on the iOS and Android platforms, mobile analytics provider Flurry has found that consumers are spending as much time in social networking apps as they are in mobile games.
Games have historically led usage on mobile. The last time that Flurry took a look back in January, it found that half of app sessions were spent in games while 30 percent was spent in social networking apps.
“We take the rise in Social Networking apps as a signal of maturation for the platform,” wrote Flurry’s vice president of marketing Peter Farago. “As game demand may be hitting its saturation point, consumers are also discovering other apps, namely Social Networking.” → Read More
San Francisco-based Fingerprint Digital, a startup building educational apps for kids as well as a parent-child communication system for iOS apps, is doubling the size of its network today with the addition of a series of six new apps from French developer Happy Blue Fish Studio. The developer has chosen Fingerprint’s in-app “Mom-Comm” system (as the company calls it) to enhance its “The Deskplorers” story-telling apps designed for ages 6 through 9. The newly added apps are focused on reading comprehension, problem solving, and foreign languages, while also taking kids through adventures in history.
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Stepping back from remarks a few weeks ago that suggested that Zynga was about to go on a shopping spree, Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus said the $180 million acquisition of Draw Something-maker OMGPOP was a “rare instance.”
Although OMGPOP was certainly a step up from anything Zynga has ever done before, Pincus said it didn’t represent a change in strategy from last year. He said Zynga will continue to be “prudent and bottom line-oriented” in its decisions today during the first-quarter earnings call. That’s a change in tone from an interview with Bloomberg a few weeks ago when he said that he expected to do “a few” OMGPOP-sized deals in the next three to five years. His remarks helped send shares tumbling 13.9 percent from the day the story appeared. → Read More
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