Gaming: social

Showing posts with label social. Show all posts

Friday, August 19, 2011

Activision: assessments of the social gaming company "Out Of"

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He wrote for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts, it would like you to read: the perils of externalization of knowledge | Generation I | Surveillant society | Select two | Frame war | User manifesto | Our great sin his personal site — coldewey. cc. ? Read More

With skyrocketing room for upstart tech companies is not just a naysayer scientists, crying "bubble". Activision (Activision-Blizzard, to be precise) skeptical of numbers made for competitors like Zynga and Rovio evaluated or several billion dollars to put them out of reach for easy purchase. Maybe they hope to pick up their song after the alleged bubble POPs. Activision, long game, or is it just wishful thinking?

Speaking at Gamescom in Cologne, Activision Publishing director Eric Hirshberg poured cold water on the idea of making major investments in social gaming through high-profile acquisition of the company:

Evaluations of some companies in this space not in order, so this is a problem when it comes to acquisitions ...But don't be mistaken, thorough and methodical planning for inaction. Any new place, where people play the game, is that we are interested in.

Unfortunately, in the fast moving social gaming space, sometimes too much planning meant inaction. While Activision has many successful titles, no single approach or even trying to replicate, super-wide, super-shallow distribution titles like angry birds and Farmville. In the meantime, million sellers made overnight in wave virality that Activision seems not able to produce.

At the same time, the rate of growth of the sector said the volatility of the market. While Rovio is unlikely to suddenly reveal that it was folding underdiversified game library, it is possible that next year will bring more sobering results or mixing in the field of more examples of rapid growth suggests that the template is not only for those companies — in this case, the high valuations could be looked at as optimistic. At this time, Activision will be waiting for him.

In any case, the commentary does not imply Hirshberg any great level of illumination at Activision's part. This kind of bemused skepticism does not inspire confidence, either, which (as Nintendo) probably impatient with the failure of the world's largest Game maker take advantage of this new paradigm. They can begin to see light, though: they plan on social izing Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises in the game, a social network of elites in the game. They are still late side; I think they hope that will be a very good thing.

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Sunday, August 14, 2011

OpenFeint brings 60 new mobile social games to China through partnership with The9

Leena Rao is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school of the Medill School of journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007 she helped lead efforts for advocacy and community relationships Congressman Carloyn Maloney in New York. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003 where it was ... ? Read More

Earlier this year, the mobile social gaming platform OpenFeint has teamed up with one of its investors, Chinese game company The9 for game developers for the Android platform. OpenFeint and The9 announced that he will use the $ 100 million Fund9, based on Chinese mobile Internet Development Fund, funding for game developers using the OpenFeint platform for Chinese games.

In just three months of work The9's, branded version of OpenFeint, game zone, already disseminates 60 live games through 30 App stores in China. OpenFeint and The9 also announced that they have chosen the first five recipients of funding from their Android porting initiative. With this funding, developers will be able to transfer these popular iOS games for Android and sell them at the global level. The9 then localize and publish games for the Chinese market.

Games were selected based on their quality, downloads and the ability to game developers. Some games include: Pix'n love rush, BulkyPix, Shift! 2 fishing Cactus, iSlash Deullo games, mini motor Racing binary factories and Babel, BulkyPix.

OpenFeint is not the only company in an attempt to cash in on the large potential of the Chinese gaming market. Zynga also develop its presence in China with a new partnership with Chinese Internet giant Tencent, launching a beta version of Zynga town, the new Chinese localized version of CityVille.

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Monday, August 8, 2011

Social learning game developers Airey Labs raises $ 1. 5 m from Google Ventures, others

Robin Wauters is currently staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. In addition to its activities, professional blogging, he is an entrepreneur, the organizer of the event, from time to time the Council consultant and an angel investor, but the most important champion of the full launch. He lives and works in Belgium, a small country in Europe. He can often be found work from their home or ... ? Read More

Airey Labs, mobile, Tablet and started building browser games with educational twist to young children, has landed $ 1.5 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Foundation of wealth and the founder of Playdom, Rick Thompson.

Airey Labs said that he wants his social games to come with a genuine educational value that will be approved by parents.

The company is part of the StartX command (formerly known as SSE Labs), Stanford student Startup Accelerator.

The launch was founded in the year 2011 genius named Andrew Hsu.

Check this guy's summary:

Hsu, who began the study of molecular biology at the University of Washington (Uw) laboratory at the age of 10, won the Grand Prize in the Washington State Science and engineering fair in 11, matriculated in SS 12 and finished with three degrees of Bachelors of science in the age of 16 years. At the age of 19 years he was a 4 year old candidate in Neurobiology at Stanford University, when he left in early 2011 to continue his dream run. He was recently named a member of the Thiel 20-20.

He is also the author of several books and once a competitive swimmer.

Airey Labs is a new generation of social learning games for children. We build iOS games on your mobile phone and tablet, social games for your browser and casual massively.

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German Social Game Maker wooga battles bosses, prepares to bring Top name phone

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

When it comes to social games, Zynga is the undisputed king. But when it comes to second place, it is not so easy to say — the competition is stiff. However, today a German developer of social games, Wooga has (at least for now) with EA as new Deputy in town. Wooga now see over 35 million monthly active users, through its social games from EA in just under 31 million, 30 million Playdom and CrowdStar on the 22 million people, rounds out the top 5, according to Appdata.

Wooga does not receive nearly as much attention as Zynga or EA, with former steaming to the IPO and the last veteran of the industry that just so happened to acquire PopCap for about $ 1.3 billion last week.

However, seeing as 75 per cent of Wooga 35 million monthly active users playing outside the United States (and that 70 per cent are women), Wooga many qualities that set it apart from the Pack. Not to mention the launch of a 24 million dollars in may from Highland Capital Partners and a number of other VCs.

Of course not yet adopted the Appdata numbers into account the fact that Popcap is in the process of being integrated into EA umbrella. Yes, it may take some time to complete, but when combined the two, he undoubtedly will EA right back on top (like Popcap 17 million + users of his name). Wooga founder and CEO Jens Begemann, however, see EA move as one to get new users to purchase. And he certainly has.

Nevertheless, given that wooga grew 300% last month, Begemann has reason to be confident that his company has a lot of growth ahead. It is also interesting to note that we can be at the point where Facebook social gaming market in the United States closed at saturation, and that we could see the game developers, moving to international markets, increased and more users. If so, wooga already has a good start.

Although Zynga and PopCap is already firmly on the mobile market, wooga seemingly not to rush to bring their games to mobile, despite the fact that this obviously offers great potential for growth of the company. Today however, this strategy has changed as the game developer announced that he will be bringing top games, diamond dash, iOS later this summer. Game gem bashing Facebook has already racked up 10 million users and will be the first game at the iPads and iPhones. But the Director said that she plans to application for Android, which will be released shortly thereafter, and also plans to develop a new title exclusively in HTML5, which users can be expected to give approximately the same time.

The rest of his suite (which includes games like Happy hospital and Monster world), he continued, will soon follow. The company hired another team to develop mobile applications, then the one which is his game of Facebook, how he wants to optimize his game for the mobile platform, not just to move just because this is an area of growth. "We know that if we copy the Facebook game, we would not be successful," said the Director-General within social applications.

Begemann was adamant about that from the outset, the company focused on creating engaging gaming experience for the user, not just the preserve of viral growth. It's an interesting lesson for emerging social game developers to learn and seemingly simple: If you make a good game, you simply cannot establish any endurance on the market. It will be interesting to see where wooga does go for mobile devices; If this is successful, EA may very well be German enemy, Nipping at its heels.

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Sunday, August 7, 2011

Social and online PlayStation Vita formally detail

We've heard about Playstation Vita online opportunities long before we even knew his name, but only now solidifying official details. We knew that it would have connected to the network staging area for each game and an instrument of social proximity (LiveArea and respectively), and although some of the features are there, they have been tweaked a little.

"Near" is "gifting" system, rather than a tool of social discovery; It is intended to leave gifts in certain places accessible to certain people or for all users, and consisting of the items in the game, and so on.

"livearea" is a multi-purpose system upgrade, which will show things like notifications from friends, new DLC and update for the game, and (I'm guessing) shares as PSN games sales and what have you. There is in fact the actual part, entitled Live, which I think Microsoft may actually raise with in this case, the Playstation Live and Xbox Live can actually create confusion.

"Party" is a cross-game voice chat system, available throughout the system. You can override it to command games (divided into red and blue voice channels in the game, for example), but otherwise it's almost always there. This is also your friends list, and you can create a game-related groups for easy start with your team or buddies. I hope they add an exception for this so don't eat up your 3 G bandwidth allowance.

Sounds pretty solid to me, although I think they're kind of Gutted. There is much to be done on the basis of close games, more than they really can run with possible. I would expect more updates to these capabilities, although, of course, developers will find interesting ways to use them, so we will continue to keep an eye on Vita.

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Social game developer Kixeye raises $ 18 million, adds Zynga co-founder Andrew Trader to its Board

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Back in April, a developer of games, casual collective rebranded as Kixeye and launched a new real-time strategy game, titled battle pirates. Since launch, it was hard work at improving some of the new capital to expand his team and implement additional headers. Officially it happened to pass this morning as the company announced that it has closed $ 18 million Series c round of financing, bringing the total investment to $ 23.5 million.

The new round led by Jafco Ventures, were from returning investors Trinity Ventures and enterprise partners. The increase, Jafco managing partner Joe Horowitz is the signing of the Council of its launch and will be merged into — big symbolic feather in the CAP for Kixeye — Zynga co-founder Andrew Trader, aka "a. t."

According to Kixeye CEO will Harbin run hit his achievement over the past 8 months, which has become profitable and positive cash flow. So when you add a trader's Board of Directors, Kixeye hopes to use Zynga's Executive Vice President of sales and business development experience (especially in the scale Zynga in the largest player in the social gaming) to help continue its recent growth.

With regard to the trader, he said that he saw Kixeye emerge as one of the leading innovators in social gaming space, especially for hardcore gamers. "Gamers want a big game, not re-skinned versions of the same," said a. t. "I am pleased to be part of this company and I look forward to helping them continue their successful trajectory." And speaking of skins and cloning, both things that Kixeye became extremely conscious, given that the launch last week accused funded competitor Kabam, copying its successful backyard monsters and skins for the beta launch Kabam in the Edgeworld.

As Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat, while charges skins have become commonplace in the rapidly growing (and competitive) social games space but Kixeye thought that "especially egregious" in this instance. "This is not only offensive to us," Harbin told VentureBeat. "It's very bad for this space. We are fighting an uphill battle to create hardcore games on Facebook. More clones for these games, the more they can sour cream consumers in the market ".

And that more charges of stealing (and hides), also known as Zynga (and hence, a.t.), who was accused of stealing source code for Farmville, for example.

Thus players social gaming, everyone is looking for ways to distinguish their brands and their names from the competition. In the case of Kixeye, Harbin said that the company plans to use some of its new funding to start a new, aggressive release cycle, which will include some new approaches to social games.

"Next year we will be releasing one major title for the quarter, since our future war Commander RTAS," said the Director. "We're also going to create games for Facebook, which nobody had seen before, including dynamic MMORPG, racing game and, hopefully, titles that really push the envelope". And Harbin has every reason to want to take these genres in Facebook, as racing, action, and the hidden objects are genres that have multiple names on Facebook at the moment.

And the company is growing at a rate that justifies his new quest: over the past 18 months, Kixeye has grown its group from 3 to 60, and passed with little presence on Facebook to more than 5 million monthly active users. Part of the reason that Kixeye was so firmly defending backyard monsters is that the game was really what put Kixeye on the map, as it is currently averaging more than 1 million active users per day.

So as a developer of games of San Francisco goes ahead with a WAD of cash in his pocket, you can probably expect run continue to focus on creating a Facebook titles for the hardcore gamer, trying to make a more interesting and challenging games, older and more mature audience. And I would expect that occurs after the top engineering talent will be part of these efforts.

More information on Kixeye check 'em out at home here.

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Saturday, August 6, 2011

Social gaming startup diversion raises funding from Eric Schmidt, Michael Eisner, other

Leakage, Los Angeles based social gaming Studio, backed by Shawn Fanning and Michael Eisner, who are billed as the "founding advisors – has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt TomorrowVentures, Hearst Corporation and Tornante Eisner in the company.

Marcy Carsey (producer of sitcoms as Roseanne, the Cosby Show, 3rd Rock from the Sun and that 70s Show) and angel investor Bilger art also joined the round.

In addition young company announced that it has landed $ 1 million advertising deal with Sony Pictures, and that it has launched a new social game called A-List on Facebook.

Earlier this year, we reported that the diversion has raised $ 300000 in seed funding from Tornante company, and that it has launched its first game FameTown. According to AppData game currently averages about 480 000 monthly active users, which gives him the title of 480 on the Leaderboard (away from # 1, Zynga in CityVille, which boasts over 80 million monthly users).

A-List, which started on Facebook earlier this month, it's a game where users star in virtual movies get fame, fortune and fame among other industry professionals.

The diversion was founded in 2010 Dayvid Iannaci (Director), Amir Halim (CTO), Chris Bruce (lead developer) and Jason Carlton (Vice President).

The diversion was established in early 2010 with the clear objective to provide the necessary integration between entertainment and the current revival of social gaming. The founders are all very ...

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DeNA and ngmoco launch mobile social gaming platform Mobage world

Dr. Serkan Toto is currently working as the first and only Asian-based writer for the TechCrunch network, mainly covers with Japan technology and Web companies for TechCrunch, CrunchGear and MobileCrunch. Serkan also works full-time as an independent Internet and mobile industry consultant with a focus on the Japanese market. He is Saint lingual, holds an MBA and a doctorate in economics. Serkan ... ? Read More

Whether the world is ready for mobile social gaming revolution? Apparently, the Tokyo-based Dena, a company that makes $ 1.3 billion a year just by offering mobile games for users of the Japanese cellular phone and acquired by ngmoco for $ 400 million in December to think so. DeNA/ngmoco released in English (and Chinese) version of Mobage, his successful Japanese mobile social gaming platform on Android yesterday.

Think of Mobage like Facebook and Zynga rolled into one, but

-available exclusively to mobile phones (PC version)
-the first and third-party games (DeNA/ngmoco himself makes games too)
and virtual social graph instead of real (most of your friends will probably be strangers, as in the Japanese version)

The platform is completely new, stand-alone social network with focus on mobile games and its own virtual currency MobaCoin – and now ngmoco is designed to replicate the success of the DeNA seen in Japan (where the company boasts 30 million users) at the global level.

Mobage in English ("Mobage global") originally oriented Android users in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. A Chinese version ("Mobage China") was launched through the local Office of the Corporation DeNA, as well as "Japan", she Mobage is not associated with a global platform.

On Mobage English players can choose between different items from the get-go (i.e., Pocket God, and so on we rule the Earth, the Zoo, paper toss – see the full list here), with more than 100 additional games in development at the present time.

Much like Zynga, the business model is to offer most of the games for free and money through the sale of virtual goods. As hinted at above, this model works very well for DeNA in Japan, where the company is currently listed at $ 7.6 billion capitalization (you read that right).

Future plans for DeNA ngmoco include more names, iOS version Mobage and expansion of the global market more Mobage. Competitor GREE (another power of the Tokyo-based mobile social gaming, recently acquired Openfeint for $ 104 million) is expected to make a push in the United States market soon, too (that the company opened an Office in California in January of this year).

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Friday, August 5, 2011

Ngmoco and AT&T partner to bring Android users social gaming platform Mobage

AT&T and mobile social gaming company ngmoco, which is owned by the Japanese gaming giant DeNA, has just announced a major agreement to bring social gaming platform Mobage clients for Android AT&T.

According to the release of Mobage will serve as a platform for users of Android AT&T to detect and play games, and connect and communicate with other players around the world. AT&T said that the agreement is the first of its kind between ngmoco and United States wireless carrier.

AT&T customers will be able to find Mobage application conveniently at the Android market, where they can easily access the full catalog of Mobage names, as well as contact with the entire community of mobile social gaming Mobage.

Tokyo-based Dena, making $ 1.3 billion a year, acquired the ngmoco for $ 400 million last year. Mobage launched worldwide last week, the platform is a stand-alone social network with focus on mobile games and includes its own virtual currency MobaCoin. Platform offers most of the games free of charge and monetizes through sale of virtual goods. As my colleague Serkan Toto wrote last week, the English first Mobage aims to Android users in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Ultimately, Ngmoco has plans to roll out Mobage for users of iOS.

AT&T has also worked with Zynga to provide custom games and content to the customer of the carrier.

ngmoco ("next generation mobile company") the creation and production of games for the iPhone. CEO Neil Young is a former Executive from Electronic Arts, where he led the development of ...

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