G-cluster Receives Investment From SFR Développement
Finnish cloud-based video and gaming service provider G-cluster has received a significant financial investment from French telecom operator SFR. SFR was one of the first companies to deploy G-cluster's gaming service in 2010 and it now joins Intel Capital as the company's financial backer. No details were released, but the deal is reportedly worth millions of euros.
G-cluster’s core business is a fully customizable, cloud-based video and gaming platform. The company’s patented technology allows high-end video games and full-length films to be distributed to a wide range of devices, including televisions, personal computers, tablets and mobile phones.
Stardoll Reaches 150 Million Users
Stardoll, the Swedish paper doll site has reached 150 million registered users. The news was disclosed by Mattias Miksche, the CEO of the company in his twitter stream. We also caught the news in the official Stardoll news stream in the morning, but it has since disappeared. The site has definitely hit a nice growth trajectory. Back in March last year we reported the company counting down to 100 million users.
Supercell Announce Battle Buddies, Builds On Gunshine.net Success
Just a couple of weeks ago we wrote that Supercell would be announcing multiple new games in early 2012. Well, one of them will be Battle Buddies, and will be available for tablets in the first half of 2012. Supercell's first game, Gunshine.net focused on bringing the experience of social, real-time multiplayer gaming to as many people as possible. Since then, the Helsinki, Finland based company has proved the concept works and raised north of 10 million USD from Accel Partners and others.
Minecraft Reaches 18 Million Downloads
Minecraft, the super popular Swedish indie game, has reached 18 million downloads. This can be seen from the statistics on the game website. In addition to the 18 million downloads, the game has been bought by 4.3 million people. With current price of 19,95€ a piece that translates to a over 80 million euros in revenue. However, the game has been priced differently over the years so this is just a guiding figure.
Supercell Plans To Release Multiple New Games For Mobile And Tablets In Q1/2012
The Finnish gaming company Supercell, that launched the hugely successful game Gunshine.net earlier this year is working on their next release, Pets vs Orcs. They have stated this in their blog in the beginning of November.
Xbox Live On Windows 8 Promises Asynchronous Cross Platform Games
We've covered Microsoft's new Windows 8 quite extensively this week on ArcticStartup from the Build conference, but the truth is - all this will have a lot of implications in the different ecosystems regarding mobile operating systems, app stores and what not. Furthermore, enabling Xbox Live to run as an application on Windows 8 OS will have huge possibilities for gaming companies.
Yummi Apps Finalising Wizardia
A Lithuanian based social gaming company and developer of such games, Yummi Apps has announced that they are finalising work on their game combining social and mobile features - Wizardia. The game will connect these two mega trends in real-time to create a new gaming experience, according to the company's press release.
A Deeper Dive Into Supercell
I talked to Supercell's CEO Ilkka Paananen on where the company stands today and a little about their future plans as well. Supercell is a hot Finnish gaming company that closed a $12 million series A from Accel in May. We covered the company in February initially and it's come incredibly far since then. Supercell employs some 40 people in two locations and its Gunshine game has shown some incredible traction.
Russian Gamers Buy Less Virtual Goods
Experts of the Russian gaming industry report that Russian gamers are less active in paying for virtual goods compared to their Western counterparts. Two of the biggest local social games developers, i-Jet Media and Progrestar, claim only 5-7% of all gamers buy virtual goods when playing. In comparison, about a third of gamers pay for virtual goods in Western countries (and about 60% of paying gamers buy goods at least once a month), according to the recent research by VGMarket.
Another big Russian game developer, Innova, noticed a further characteristic of Russian gamers: '...unlike gamers in the West, in Russia players want to pay for something that would improve their character's abilities, not change their appearances'. Though this is mostly true for massively multiplayer online role-playing games, not social games.
Advant Games Launches Lottery Innovation Network
We covered Advant Games, a Finnish money gaming company, back in 2009 about their development and how they're building their company. Back then they had just Veikkaus, the Finnish lottery monopoly, as their client, but today work with all three Finnish money gaming companies and a a handful of foreign companies as well.
Grey Area Launched Shadow Cities In The US
After a successful launch in Finland and Sweden, Grey Area brought their Shadow Cities app to the AppStore in US. Users can download the game for free for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Shadow Cities is one of the first massively multiplayer online games that is location-based. User's location data is emlpoyed to create augmented reality where players can be part of real-time large-scale combat with friends and other gamers. As the company puts it themselves: Shadow cities turns players into mage and streets into game.
Smartphones Are The Future Of Gaming
A mobile is no more your routine device for making calls on the go or texting while you are out of office. It has totally evolved from being a mere lightweight wireless communication device to an all- purpose connection to the entire world and lifestyle. Let's not dwell on emphasizing on communication advantages it gives us and focus on the other aspects - entertainment.
Angry Birds Hits Chrome App Store, Available For Free
Getting anything for free is usually a pretty good deal, but getting the hit game free from the Google Chrome store is an even better deal! The hit game is available to anyone through Google Chrome Webstore. The Chrome App Store is a service for the users of the Google Chrome browser and the applications can be run within the browser. This also signals a change for Rovio, the company that created Angry Birds as this is the first version of the game in a browser based format.
Shadow Cities Launches In Sweden, Eyes Global Launch
The Helsinki, Finland based mobile gaming company Grey Area announced the expansion of their Shadow Cities game to Sweden today. You can download the game from the Swedish App Store (here). This has been an anticipated move as there were leaks (and tweets) about such a launch already earlier this year. Sweden is the second, so called, test market for Shadow Cities before it plans to launch the game globally. Together with the announcement of the opening of Sweden for the game, Grey Area has updated the game client with lots of tweaks and improvements based on customer feedback.
Marketing And Selling: GameBook
In this series, we study companies on how they market and sell their products or services. In the this post we'll be looking to interview Kalle Väinölä, the co-founder and CEO of Freedrop Innovations Ltd. The company is behind the Gamebook concept that golfers can use to make the most of their round. We covered the company in January when they inked an investment agreement from Anssi Vanjoki. As this is the first story in the series, all kinds of feedback is naturally welcome regarding the questions.
Star Arcade Is The Gaming Community For "The Next Billion"
Star Arcade, launching today, is a new gaming community from Finland, aimed at the next billion mobile phone users. Star Arcade's primary markets are around the world, in India, South America, Far East and Africa. The company has been founded by Harri Myllylä and Jonne Castrén. Harri Myllylä was one of the founders behind Openbit Oy, a company marketing and developing mobile payment and DRM solution. The company was sold to a publicly listed Indian company in 2008. Jonne Castrén is one of the founders of 3D Arts Oy, a creator of mobile games.
PayPal Opens Micropayment Solution To Public
Last week PayPal announced that it has opened its micropayments solution to the public globally. In essence, it's a better way for developers, content creators and publishers to charge for small amounts of content quickly. PayPal has designed this new service to be more useful for small, quick payments instead of the traditional way of purchasing and paying for services with PayPal where you have to leave the original website you were on.
Applifier Signs $2M In Funding, Sees Huge Opportunities In Web Based Games
The news broke out today that Applifier has closed $2M in seed funding. The investors include MHS Capital, PROfounders Capital, Tekes, Lifeline Ventures, and angel investors Jyri Engeström, David Gardner and Lars Stenfeldt Hansen. The terms of the investment were not disclosed. Applifier is also announcing today that they have expanded their ad network into the web gaming space - where pain points are similar to that of Facebook; the market is fragmented, user acquisition costs are high and its becoming expensive to get users. We talked to Jussi Laakkonen about the expansion and they see huge opportunities in the space.
Alan Wake Set To Release May 21st In Europe, May 18th In The States
The Finnish Helsingin Sanomat has interviewed Sami Järvi the writer of the game and in the article they also confirm the release dates for Alan Wake. The game is set to be released in Europe on the 21st of May and in the US, a few days earlier, on the 18th. A while back in a "Predictions for 2010" -post I predicted that the game will be launched a few months late, but it seems that there is no reason at the moment to delay it. After all, the release date is about 2 months away.
Crown Of Byzantus Challenges Browser Based MMOGs (Invites)
The Finnish Casual Continent aims to challenge the leading MMOGs with its new Crown of Byzantus browser based game. Speaking of leading MMOGs, one can mention Travia, OGame and Seafight which together have some 60 million registered users. All these games are directly playable from the browser and require no installation to the local computer. While the average revenue per user generated is only 1.5 euros, it is still approximately a 90 million euro market.
Trials HD By RedLynx Reaches 500 000 Unit Sales Mark
The Finnish multi platform game developer RedLynx has announced that it has sold over half a million copies of its popular Trials HD game on the XBOX360 (via Kauppalehti). The game is worth about 1200 Microsoft points which accounts to about 15 USD totalling in 7,5 million USD in sales.
The company itself is also in very good shape financially. RedLynx is already showing some of the success in its finances as 2009 revenues are in the range of three million with a million in profit. Last time RedLynx was profitable was in 2004 with a 356 thousand euro profit. High fluctuations are natural in the gaming business as it takes a long time to build a game and very few are capable of pumping out new games on continuous basis to keep the company constantly profitable.
Remedy Entertainment Sheds Some Light On Alan Wake
Remedy Entertainment, a Finnish gaming company, has revealed some more information regarding their newest game Alan Wake, which has a planned release date in the Spring 2010. For those unfamiliar with Remedy Entertainment, they are the developers of Max Payne the first person shooter based in the city of New York. The game was an immense success by all means and they later sold the rights to the game for $10 million US to Take-Two Interactive as well as close to million shares of stock.
Advant Games Successfully In The Money Gaming Business
I talked to Sami Kuivasaari, one of the people behind a Finnish spin-off startup Advant Games, a little while back about their company and the way they see the money gaming market. Advant Games is a young spin-off company from a joint research project between the Tampere University of Technology, Tekes (the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation) as well as Veikkaus (the money gaming monopoly of Finland). I titled this post explicitly as successfully, because in 2008 just 2 years after their founding Advant Games turned over close to 400k€ with a 20% profit margin.
Frosmo Secures A Class Angel Round
Frosmo, a Finnish based skill gaming company, has secured an angel round from highly distinguished investors and individuals according to Kauppalehti. The size of the investment round has not been disclosed, but the investment round included 6 individuals; Risto Siilasmaa, Hannu Vaajoensuu, Kirsi Eräkangas, Markku Toivanen, Jarkko Veijalainen and Klaus Berner. Kauppalehti tells that the investment will enable the company's strong growth overseas - so it is a relatively large angel round.
Frosmo is company developing a browser based skill gaming service, very much like that of King.com - the world's largest and most popular casual skill gaming community. Frosmo's main markets are in Eastern Europe and Asia - not the most common country's of operations for a Nordic company. Nevertheless, Eastern Europe has been a growing market for casual games in the recent years.
Frosmo has some 40 000 players daily. While their main site may not be the fanciest of sites on the internet, they tailor their service to customers through partners. In Finland they have partnered for example with MTV3 to host their service TopKani.fi which is a lot more user friendly and attractive.
MMORPG Entropia Receives Banking License (Briefly)
The Swedish based online game Entropia has received a banking license enabling it to handle money in more innovative ways. It will open the door for online roleplaying games to expand themselves to a totally new industry - banking.
Read more at Realtid.se (in Swedish or use Google Translate).
Briefly is a new form of blog posts that will give a brief introduction to a topic written elsewhere. We want to provide our readers the best service and coverage of startup news from the Nordics and Baltics. This is one more step towards that direction.
Tweehouse Scores 350 000 Euro From Tekes
Tweehouse, a 6 months old Finnish MMO gaming startup that was spun from Valve, has received 3500 000 euro from who else than Tekes, Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation.
Tweehouse got the grant to assist in the ongoing development of TrunkTech, an end-to-end technology platform designed to develope games in co-operation with a U.S. based games publisher. With the grant Tweehouse team will be able to grow its current size of nine developers and designers in Finland and additional marketers and producers in Los Angeles, CA. They just got their first game out, Eco-Rangers. A good start, even though according to the team it's only a mere poke at the market compared to what's in the plans: The Eco-Rangers was mainly a marketing campaign for Taco Bell in the US, whereas TrunkTech will be published as SaaS (’Software as a Service’) later in 2009 and used as the core engine in buiding of many more massively multi-player applications or even in virtual worlds.
The startup has a rather unusual business model. I quote myself here from the previous post on the company:
Tweehouse will target purely US market in the beginning. For this Snap TV is an ideal partner [for Tweehouse] to handle the Sales and PR and leave the game development and pipeline management to the Helsinki office. Snap TV prides itself for having a dedicated sales force that calls on all classes of retail and ships products to over 20,000 storefronts across the United States and Canada, thus enabling quick access to market when the product is ready....
The business model will build on the end-to-end solution. The service covers everything from design, development and marketing all the way to running the platform and moderation of the games themselves. In essence Tweehouse is aiming to build and sell solid gaming platforms to their customers. In addition to a fixed price element, the company also aims to always build an upside to the products they sell. This could mean for example a revenue share model that will be a percentage of each game sold.
As Paavo Perttula of Tweehouse notes, Finnish success in gaming is partly due to the long tradition stemming from the very active demo scene of the 80's. Along with the demo scene, the Finnish goverment has had an active role contributing to the success as well. In 2007, the Finnish technology fund (Tekes) gave in excess of 6M euros in government grants to gaming initiatives, whereas the combined figure for the whole of the EU was 21M euros. This time it was Tweehouse's turn to give the international expansion a try, and based on the progress so far they are on schedule. Congratulations to the team and good luck!
Gaming Defies Down Turn With Venture Capital
Jussi Laakkonen, CEO of Everyplay, has done extensive research in terms of investments to the gaming industry in the recent years. We also covered Jussi's previous findings in ArcticStartup close to two months ago when he reported that approximately 2 to 4 million USD are invested into the casual gaming market each week.
Jussi has compiled a nice 2 blog post analysis into the market with discoveries such as investments peaking in July 2008 to the amount of 71M USD in total to the industry. He has also added the MMORPG market to the analysis. It's clear that the two largest segments in the gaming industry, receiving funding are the MMORPG and the casual gaming segments.
Some of the largest investments made were 9You's 100M USD, 83M USD into Big Fish Games, 29M USD into Zynga Games and Gaia's 11M USD financing rounds.
So with regards to my previous post on Betware from Iceland, I asked whether we should cover the gaming industry more, a clear answer from you was - yes, please. We'll get more insight into this industry in the future as the market is one of the most attractive ones in many ways, not only investments, at this moment.
However, have a read at the full analysis into the investments by Jussi Laakkonen of Everyplay - Part 1 and Part 2.
Photo by A*A*R*O*N (CC:by-nc-sa)
Betware, Another Gaming Solution From Iceland
Betware is also another of Library House's nominees for the 100 hottest companies to change the media technology industry. Like the name suggests, Betware is into providing online gambling and gaming platforms through turnkey solutions. The company itself is relatively old as it has started operations already back in 1996.
Betware has had enough time to build a very respectable and admirable business proposition for its clients through it products and solutions. The platform truly offers all the necessary modules and tools required to start a gaming site and get it going - hence a true turnkey solution.
In terms of games, they have developed over 100 games categorized into number games, sports betting games, racing games, instant games, casino games, multiplayer games as well as live betting. Betware also claims that these games are all playable through the mobile phone, internet as well as in some cases in the future, the digital television.
There's definitely a large ecosystem of different kind of gaming in the Nordic and Baltic region, be it mobile games, casual games or money games like in the case of Betware. What are your thoughts, should we cover these topics more in the future as well?
Icelandic Gaming Juggernaut CCP
Library House awarded the Icelandic gaming company CCP as one of the hottest mediatech companies most likely to change the media technology industry in the world. I decided to dig a little deeper into the company to see what they are up to. In short CCP is the developer and father of the MMORPG Eve Online.
Eve Online is a relatively old, but still some what popular, massive-multiplayer-online-role-playing-game (or MMORPG). According to Compete.com, CCP gathers just under 100k unique visitors a month. You need a client to play the game and it costs 19,95€ a for a 30 day period. Eve Online has over 200 000 subscribers, and with some quick calculations that makes at least 4M € a month, if all the subscribers are paying members.
CCP is a relatively large Icelandic company that merged back in 2006 with White Wolf Publishing Inc to create the largest virtual gaming universe, at least this was the case back in 2006 when World of Warcraft wasn't quite as popular. White Wolf Publiching Inc was a popular published of offline role playing games and one of the reasons for the merger was to combine these talents into synergies that would yield better results both offline and online.
Furthermore the company has offices in UK, Iceland, US and a representative office in China. They also have more than 40 jobs open so they definitely see growth in this sector despite the downturn (according to Fox Business, they had more than 300 employees back in June).
