Mediatonic Management has closed a 5 million euro fund that will begin to finance games and media products from Finland. The fund has been set up by investments from Fennia insurance, Henki-Fennia insurance as well as the Sonera Pension fund. People behind the fund include Tanu-Matti Tuominen and Marko Tulonen.
The fund is a project and catalog fund that will invest in commercial games, television formats and web services. The fund does not invest into the companies in the manner a venture capitalist would invest, but into the rights of the products and services sold. Therefore the fund’s business model is to take a commission from cash flows generated by the products and services sold. Continue reading »
Those following the mobile gaming industry paid notice that the Finnish gaming studio Universomo was shut down (in Finnish) by its owner THQ Wireless, which acquired the Finnish firm back in 2007. Rumors started to spread on Tuesday this week and pretty soon THQ confirmed the liquidation of the studio. This is part of a bigger shift in the game industry.
Massively multiplayer online games and Wii Sports are so last season, it seems. Uplause is a new Finnish gaming startup with quite an interesting a concept — “Crowd Games” or Massively Multiplayer Crowd Playing Game (MMCPG) as the firm calls them. Uplause’s crowd games are developed for large events, where the audience can collectively participate in playing the interactive mini-games, real time, on location. See a quick overview of the concept in the video below.
Grey Area, a small startup operating in stealth mode, is gearing up to change the cityscape for everybody. I get back to how they are going to do this later in the post, but the story of how this startup came to be is equally interesting.
I first met the guys back in OpenCoffee Helsinki what must be more than a year ago. I remember Mikko Hämäläinen telling me how they were exploring possibilities to set up a company with two of his friends, Andreas Karlsson and Teemu Tuulari, from Ericsson. All three had started at Ericsson in 2003-2004 and met when they were put in the small team with the task of developing an Ericsson network node.
Nordic Game Program has had its ceremony in Malmö Sweden where it gave out three million Danish Kronor worth of funding. The program was started by the joint decision between the Icelanding, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish Ministries of Culture to promote Nordic games. The program was founded in 2006 and has plans to run until 2012. A total of 84 projects were submitted and only eight received funding. Continue reading »
The Finnish company Futuremark, who has been previously known to be the leader in 3D, mobile and PC benchmarking, has released a game called Shattered Horizon on Steam. The company has been around since 1997 and was previously known as Mad Onion. Benchmarking is the practice of determining the capabilities of graphical processors in different computer environments. Futuremark has released annually new releases of their 3DMark to test each new feature of the cards to determine how well they run. Continue reading »
Yesterday I wrote (or ranted) about the need to also market your iPhone apps instead of just throwing them into App Store and complaining people do not find them. This time I will elaborate more on the marketing tools. There is a multitude of ways you can market your app and one could write a book on that, so let’s just cover the basics here (which should not be much news if you have thought about things at all).
The iPhone craze is hot as ever, with over 50,000 developers reportedly registered, 800 million apps downloaded, and VC investments being made to pure-play iPhone firms. Some have commented that cream really rises to the top from the hundreds of new apps daily published in the App Store, but there have been even bigger amount of complaints that lots of great apps or games go unnoticed. A big fuss has also been the pricing competition, reducing prices to 0,99 or even below in order get visibility on the Top lists and drive downloads that way. In my opinion, lots of the aspiring developers should look in the mirror rather than criticize Apple or others for their poor performance.
As sexy a business as iPhone and for example games is, it does not mean that normal business rules would not apply — you cannot just build a product, make it available to the world and expect a huge success. iPhone has been great in that it gives the developers direct access to consumers world-wide. But along with the access comes also a big bunch of responsibilities and headaches. You need to do marketing as well just as in any other business. And that is what most small developers are poor at.
Last week I came across something rather fresh that I had not seen before. This drew our office around the screen to see what exactly this new iphone app was about. It took a while for us to wrap our heads around the new iphone game we were curiously looking at.
The game is developed by a small Finnish game developing company called Secret Exit. They describe themselves as 100 per cent independent game developer company by two guys with some game industry experience and modest merits, who have set up a shop to create refreshingly different, innovative, and -most importantly- fun games.
This is how the company describes Zen Bound, the game:
Zen Bound is difficult to describe. It is a game as much as a toy or simply an experience.
One user eloquently described the game in an iTunes review: “I thought this would be cool but all you do is wrap string around wood.” and his 1-star rating proves that our game is certainly not for everyone.
In a nutshell, you have a wooden sculpture which you need to paint by shifting the object into various ankles as a rope is pulled by a imaginary third party. At the same times as the rope is wrapping itself around the wooden object, it also lays down a track of paint. Goal of course being able to paint the whole scupture. Might sound easy and straight forward, but it can get pretty challenging. There’s also no time limit, which makes the iphone app more an experience than a game. You can read a more comprehensive review here, and see a demo below. Pocket Gamer who wrote the review nailed the idea of the game: The emphasis lies in experiencing the sheer joy of the interaction. Similarly, IGN Wireless wrote that with Zen Bound boundaries aren’t being pushed here; they’re getting shattered. The app sets you back 3.99€ at iTunes App Store.
Secret Exit announces that they target all home entertainment platforms where games can be digitally downloaded, but clearly the possibility to develop for a distribution channel like App Store expands the market significantly. Here’s good analysis by an ex-Jaiku developer, Teemu Kurppa on why App Store is a game changer. Not only that, only now that we have a device like iphone we start to see games like Zen Bound that really redefine what is a great mobile app, game or otherwise. Iphone enables, the very first time, truly new innovation and fresh thinking in designing interaction on a mobile device, of which Zen Bound is a perfect example. I believe this one example is just the tip of the ice berg of what’s to come. Mix in some powerful computing running the back end in the cloud and streaming it to your iphone and you’ll be amazed what we’re about to see in the very near future. Decreasing growth in laptop sales numbers will be only the first symptom of this.
Intervisio, a Finnish cross-media production firm, has licensed its Emmy-awarded Staraoke TV show to Cartoon Network. Staraoke is a combination of a karaoke-type interactive game and a talent TV-show for children. It will be a new primetime show for Cartoon Network.
Cartoon Network will produce altogether 78 episodes of the show, consisting of local series of 13 episodes for each the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland. The production is due to start now in March in London, where Cartoon Network will bring the participating children and their parents. The first show is supposed to air in the fall this year in the UK.
In Finland Staraoke starts its ninth season in fall 2009, and the program has been broadcasted also in Sweden and Hungary. The new deal is in essence the biggest single TV format licensing deal in Finland – there have not been too many of them. Intervisio and Cartoon Network will also co-operate on licensing and merchandising the Staraoke brand with products like music CDs, karaoke DVDs, road shows, and mobile content. The firms are also negotiating with game publishers, and discussing an online game with the Staraoke developer, Finnish game firm Housemarque.
XIha Life has just lowered prices in all it’s games to 6.99 and 10 euros to attract better sales. This means that more than 1000 of their games have been lowered into more affordable price groups. This is something, having a casual gaming background, I’ve been waiting for. Xiha Life is growing strong, according to Jani Penttinen – one of the founders. Xiha Life received a nice investment some time back from some Chinese investors and are building their network with that, they already have 4 international offices open.
If you look at pricing on a larger scale – it doesn’t make much sense to try and sell casual games at 20-30 dollars. Even World of Warcraft is priced at 13-15 dollars a month (depending on contract). Even with low prices, its extremely hard to build a healthy consumer base. Habbo Hotel for example has some 10% of its users paying for its services at around 10€ a month. With such figures, Habbo is considered to be one of the benchmarks in the industry.
Furthermore, looking at the price distribution of the iPhone appstore (data from July 2008), you can see clearly that most products are priced extremely modestly. With such competition, it’s very difficult to build a sustainable business. Then again, pricing online is relatively simple as you can find out the elasticity over time and thus price your products accordingly.
What’s the most you’re willing to pay for an service online and do you differentiate your willingness between service genres – entertainment, music/videos and others?
Sauma Technologies, the developer and publisher of browser-based Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), secures EUR 500,000 (USD 685,000) funding from Finnish state agencies Tekes and Finnvera, as well as the Nordic Game Program.
Sauma CEO Andreas von Koskull says “We are very proud of having secured seed funding for our game platform and our first self-published game “Hours of War”, a war simulation strategy MMO game, despite the global finance crisis [...]”
Securing funding is not a minor task in anysituation, but it’s good to remember that the liquidity crisis hardly affects Tekes or Finnvera, which are both government run institutions with annual budgets that do not follow the market sentiments. If anything they would’ve probably been designed to act as counter cyclical stabilizers if the sructure would’ve allowed it. When you find a private investor for yourself it is relatively easy to get VeraVenture funding, which is operating under Finnvera. And once you get that deal sealed, you’re good to go talk to Tekes who will normally double your money with their support. And it seems that Nordic Ministers for Culture, representing Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, are financially behind the Nordic Game Platform.
Having said that, securing funding is always a major feat for a startup and we want to congratulate the great people at Sauma for pulling this off. The game that the funding was granted for, Hours of War, MMO, a social network and a rich-media gaming experience, played through the Web browser, will be introduced in early Q1. During 2009 the Sauma team plans to expand the mass-niche war strategy franchise “Hours of War” to other platforms, as well as to develop other game franchises with a focus on a more casual audience.
The business models for the games vary but include free-to-play, monthly subscription, pay per play, micro-transactions as well as advertising revenue models, depending on the game and game audience. The browser-based MMO game industry is growing rapidly, combining a rich gaming experience with social networks. According to Sauma the massively multiplayer online games market in large is currently standing at EUR 1.6 billion.
Avatars United is a Stockholm Sweden based service that enables you to connect to your in-game friends or avatars. The service resembles pretty much the basics of any other social network, except in this case you are using your in game person to connect to others.
There is very limited information about the company behind the service, Enemy Unknown. All the data on the internet, such as no wayback machine data available, little data from Compete.com and Alexa, suggest that the company and the service itself are relatively new.
There are no other growth figures available from the company, except for Compete.com giving them close to 6k unique visits in September 2008. Avatars United also reveals on their developer page that they are looking to create an application platform to enable third party apps on their site.
Interesting concept, which brings about a few questions to my mind. First of all, if you are an active gamer that would take advantage of such a site as Avatars United, you probably play lots of different games. This of course brings in the difficulty of keeping all your avatars up-to-date on the site if you have to log in with each of them as a single user. Secondly, some game houses have also seen the urge to create a similar service – such as Warcraft Social by Blizzard.
Lots of potential for Avatars United, if they manage to bring together the real value of hosting all your avatars in one place. There is a lot of potential in this genre despite the tought competition. Glad to see some initiative being taken to grasp that opportunity.
Gemilo, a Finnish social media startup, has launched a Facebook application (or a game to be more precise) called Reign of Elements. The game was launched on 24th of October and in 4 days accumulated around 2200 members.
Gemilo activated 10 players of another game and gave them tools to create objects, weaponry, areas, enemies, etc. When the game launched, the crowdsourced designers had created an entire game on the platform that Gemilo provided. Furthermore, there is no common way to play the game as the designers and players themselves update a wiki where information on the game is shared.
The game seems to work pretty nicely and is a nicer form of text based RPG. There are small interesting details that add charm to the game, such as the slowly increasing stamina if you stay put. It will be interesting to see how the game takes off with the new Facebook design as I’m guessing the application usage in general has slowed down somewhat due to less visibility.
Mediatonic Management has closed a 5 million euro fund that will begin to finance games and media products from Finland. The fund has been set up by investments from Fennia insurance, Henki-Fennia insurance as well as the Sonera Pension fund. People behind the fund include Tanu-Matti Tuominen and Marko Tulonen.
Those following the mobile gaming industry paid notice that the Finnish gaming studio Universomo was shut down (
This week was all about the releases, new products, versions, and, er, some employees. Swedes-in-Berlin based startup 
The Finnish company 
Last week I came across something rather fresh that I had not seen before. This drew our office around the screen to see what exactly this new iphone app was about. It took a while for us to wrap our heads around the new iphone game we were curiously looking at.
Sauma Technologies
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
