Palo Alto-based Corona Labs, a cross-platform mobile app development platform provider, today announced that it has acquired Dubai-based mobile game cloud services provider Game Minion, in a deal the terms of which were not disclosed. Corona recently raised $2 million in a round including Merus Capital and Western Technology Investment, in an add-on to its Series A intended to help grow its business. The Game Minion acquisition today brings some quality engineering talent to the fold, but also provides Corona Labs with a whole new product offering, to be rebranded as Corona Cloud.
Game Minion’s current service provides leaderboards, push notifications, app analytics, achievements, cloud storage and more to developers, via just a single SDK instead of requiring that multiple ones are used in combination. A big tentpole of Game Minion’s service is that it can provide support for cross-platform multiplayer play, which is a very attractive offering for Corona Labs’ gaming clients, which now include EA thanks to the launch of that company’s Word Smack game.
Corona Cloud will be a boon not just to Corona Labs’ big clients, but also to hobbyists and indie devs who want to be able to offer the same kinds of features mobile gamers expect to see from playing big name games, but without the added development costs of creating those solutions in-house. Corona has good traction so far, with a little over 200,000 developers working with its platform since its launch in 2010, producing titles that have a combined 1 billion use sessions in just the past 10 months.
“The Corona SDK today is mainly geared towards just developing apps that you put onto the phone and onto tablets, what these guys do is add an element that blows away what’s out there today in terms of what you can do on the backend,” Corona Labs CEO Walter Luh told me in an interview. “I think if you look at the kinds of things that people want to do in games or business apps or stuff like that, they really make it incredibly easy.”
Luh and Game Minion co-founder Mohamed Hamedi further explained that what the acquired company brings to Corona won’t just be applicable to gaming apps; the infrastructure and services it provides can help with gamification efforts for sales tools, for instance, and also have uses that are applicable across a broad range of different types of applications.
The deal will see Game Minion’s team folded into Corona Labs, though for now the offices in Dubai will remain active, with a move stateside likely to follow. Existing Game Minion customers shouldn’t see their service change, and the rebranded Corona Cloud, which is currently in closed beta, is expected to open to the public in early 2013.