If you believe the analysts out there, social gaming is one of the biggest trends on the web right now. Most notably Zynga, the Valley-based Startup that brought us time consuming (and questionable products) such as MafiaWars or Farmville, definitely knows how to play the game – not only in terms of usage but also in terms of revenue, as a recent tear-down suggests.
Now Germany-based entrepreneur and well known speaker Ibrahim Evsan has teamed up with his longtime partner Thomas Bachem to dig into this lucrative and fun field. After founding Sevenload, one of Europe’s most successful video sharing sites, their new endeavor is called Up Web Game and their first product is on its way – Fliplife.
As Evsan (or “Ibo” as he is best known) told me, they were really not sure of what to do after leaving their executive positions at Sevenload. Yet after months of research and in the pursuit of a “happiness and fun and work policy” they ended up settling on the social games space.
Contrary to Zynga or Germany’s Gameforge, they are not building games upon existing platforms such as Facebook, but will have their own proprietary platform and technology. Fliplife is going to be a 2D alteration of Secondlife, whereas it has more annotations to real life experiences, such as building your virtual career. With all of life’s ups and downs you might become the CEO of a virtual company in your Fliplife persona. These characteristics clearly make Fliplife a product that’s suitable for a broader audience, unlike Second Life, which has never really succeeded in attracting the average web consumer.
The company not only consists of some highly capable individuals but has also managed to raise a 7-figure sum of funding in an A round from Germany’s Hightech Gründerfonds and Rapidshare’s VC branch, Rapidtainment.
It will be interesting to see how much traction Fliplife is able to gain without tight Facebook or Twitter Integration (apart from Connect or the Likes). Recent Seedcamp Winner Platogo eventually had to adjust their product to become more Facebook-friendly in order to attract users and find an additional distribution pathway.