While Zynga has had high-profile struggles to adapt to the rapid growth of mobile gaming, Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and CEO of the Social Gaming Network, said he’s found a solution — MasterKey, his company’s just-launched technology for cross-platform game development.
DeWolfe, who also co-founded Myspace, has been talking about the vision behind MasterKey for a while, for example telling me… → Read More
Only two months after buying Social Gaming Network (SGN), MindJolt, the game distribution company led by MySpace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe, is churning out its first mobile social game today with the launch of SGN’s Mini Café. As its name indicates, the free iOS app allows gamers to design, decorate, and manage a restaurant.
As chef and manager on Mini Cafe, you cook dishes, choose… → Read More
As we reported in April, MindJolt, the game distribution company that was acquired by MySpace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe, bought Social Gaming Network (SGN). SGN’s founder Shervin Pishevar recently announced his move to the venture world, joining Menlo Ventures as a partner. Today MindJolt is announcing a new head of SGN’s social mobile game development studio—seasoned mobile vet Ulf… → Read More
MindJolt, the game distribution company that was acquired by MySpace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe last year, has made two significant acquisitions in the gaming space today— game developer Social Gaming Network (SGN) and game network Hallpass Media. The acquisitions were first reported by the New York Times. Financial terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed.
SGN creates a number of… → Read More
When SGN founder Shervin Pishevar took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt this past September to preview his latest game, MiniTycoon Casino, he made a big bet. He predicted that the game would eventually be doing $1 million in revenue a month for the company. Well, the game launched in November, and now, just a little over a month later, they’re close. They’re on track to hit the number sometime… → Read More
Less than a week after its global launch, MiniTycoon Casino, is now the number one mobile social game on the iPhone ahead of the real social games including Empire City, TapZoo, Restaurant Story and Farmville. This is SGN’s first pure social game on the iPhone and iPod Touch. No doubt as a result of its social features, it’s also now the number one casino game, although you don’t bet real money… → Read More
SGN’s newest social game for the iPhone, MiniTycoon Casino, is now available worldwide. Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September, the game was initially rolled out in Canada, Australia and New Zealand but today is available around the world. You can download the free social gaming app in the App Store here.
The game is similar in some ways to Zynga’s Farmville, except instead of building your… → Read More
Shervin Pishevar, founder and Executive Chairman of mobile gaming company SGN, has just taken the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to showcase an impressive new iPhone application called Mini Tycoon: Casino. The game is the first of a series that Pishevar believes will be extremely popular on the platform — he’s predicting Casino will do over $1 million in revenue per month.
The preview of the… → Read More
Earlier today we learned that SGN, a mobile gaming company that focuses on the iPhone/iPad and will soon be expanding to Android, had raised $2 million from Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures and Xing founder Lars Hinrichs. Today SGN is also making its 3D shooter EXO-Planet Elite available for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the hopes of recreating the success of its hit Skies of Glory. → Read More
Mobile gaming publisher SGN’s new iPad EXO-Planet app is specifically designed to exploit the iPad’s new capabilities. While some game developers are merely converting the iPhone apps to the iPad format, the multi-player EXO-Planet is trying to elevate the shooter game experience by giving the player access to eight camera angles with a single spin of the finger.
“The key breakthrough is that in… → Read More
SGN founder and executive chairman Shervin Pishevar is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. Back in 2008, he shared a semi-lucid and beautiful post about entrepreneurism that he emailed to friends during a trip to Eastern Europe.
Then, late in 2009, he found himself wandering through Europe as part of one of Dave McClure’s Geeks On A Plane adventures. After an evening at the BetaHaus in Berlin… → Read More
Last month we got a chance to get a sneak preview of SGN’s aerial combat game Skies of Glory, which promised to bring back the free-flying gameplay of its hit predecessor F.A.S.T. with a host improvements (and a classic World War II setting). A few weeks later we got our hands on the game’s impressive trailer. The game has just gone live on the App Store, and it doesn’t disappoint. You can grab… → Read More
SGN has just given us a peek at Skies of Glory, its upcoming dogfighting game for the iPhone that’s the followup to its hit game F.A.S.T., which was released last June. That app proved to be a run-away success, pulling in over a million dollars in its first six weeks of release. Skies of Glory takes the gameplay that made F.A.S.T. a hit and builds on it, adding much improved graphics, more… → Read More
Last week Apple surprised the iPhone’s developer community with the annoucement that it was finally allowing free apps to offer in-app purchases. The move will likely lead to a fundamental shift in the way developers conduct businesss on the App Store (we’ve already begun to see some changes). I sat down with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar to talk about the annoucement’s effect on SGN’s upcoming… → Read More
Social Gaming Network (SGN), the startup that creates popular games for iPhones and social platforms like Facebook, has been seeing significant growth, with SGN’s games now on one out of every three iPhone and iPod Touch devices. To compliment this growth, SGN is adding several seasoned gaming execs to its employee roster.
SGN, which is led by CEO and founder Shervin Pishevar, has named gaming… → Read More
ToyBots CEO Shervin Pishevar, fresh off his TechCrunch50 debut, apparently wasn’t too pleased with my post yesterday calling him and his company out for not dreaming big enough. My chief complaint – that ToyBots should be building the next multi-billion dollar superhit toy, not messing around with an unproven platform solution that no one may ultimately use, but that many may ultimately copy.
So… → Read More
One of my favorite startups at TechCrunch50 earlier this week was ToyBots, a spinoff of the popular Facebook/iPhone game developer Social Gaming Network. ToyBots has created technology that they’ll license to toy manufacturers that will make those toys Internet connected and controllable. Our launch post on them is here.
I think ToyBots is the future, where all toys (and just about everything… → Read More
One of the cooler iPhone apps to launch last year was SGN’s iFun, which let you use your iPhone or iPod touch to control games on your computer screen. But iFun only works with SGN’s own games like iGolf, a new startup, iMo, launching today at TechCrunch50, expands the ability to all PC games.
Most PC games are still played using the mouse+keyboard combination. A lot of hardcore gamers like this… → Read More
Social Gaming Network (SGN) keeps on pushing out great entertainment applications for the iPhone, and we can’t help continuing to put those in the spotlight. Not only because SGN produces some damn good games that we love to play – check out its suite of Wii-like games for starters – but also because we’d really like to see more developers leverage the network capabilities of the famed Apple… → Read More
It looks like the controversy around Mob Wars , a very popular social network game that has been rumored to pull in as much as $1 million a month, is only getting started. Creator David Maestri and his company Psycho Monkey have filed suit against Zynga, a popular developer of social network games. The lawsuit centers on Zynga’s game Mafia Wars – a text-based game very similar to Mob Wars… → Read More
SGN has just released the latest update to its smash-hit iPhone game iBowl, which closed out 2008 as the 4th most popular game on the App Store. The version incorporates network support, allowing users to see what their friends online have just bowled, and adds another dimension to an already-great game.
We’re big fans of the Wii-like series of iPhone games to come from SGN. The games, which… → Read More
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2268633&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1 We’ve had a blast playing SGN’s suite of Wii-like games over the last few months – iGolf, iBowl and iBaseball (basketball, tennis and boxing are coming soon). The apps are being downloaded like crazy on the App store… → Read More
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