Lokus Digital Aims To Play With Your Reality
Hot on the heels of Grey Area comes Lokus Digital, a Finnish mobile games startup that plans to take location-based multiplayer games to a whole new level. Founded by three University of Turku graduates, the company’s mission is ambitious - to blur the border between gaming and reality.
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.
Shadow Cities Hit Europe
Not so long ago we wrote about Grey Area launching their first MMO game, Shadow Cities, in the US. Today the company surprised us with another big launch, this time in Europe. From now on the game can be downloaded for free in local AppStores in 13 European countries: Italy, France, Germany, UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark and Norway. This follows-ups company's earlier promise to open up new big markets already in June.
Breaking: Supercell Raises $12M from Accel Partners
Finnish game developer Supercell announced that it secured an investment of $12 million from Accel Partners, the leading global venture capital firm with a wealth of experience in the gaming industry. This is really great news for a gaming company that was founded only in June 2010. Their first game, Gunshine, was released this February as a closed beta and has proven to be quite addictive among the first adopters. Gunshine is described as a game that bridges the gap between browser-based massively-multiplayer games and social games, with deep online gameplay and extensive social features. Now that the product is about to enter open beta and will become available for everyone to play, the investment will help Supercell accelerate its growth, expand its team and also release new games and target new platforms.
New Trailer & Screen Shots Of Upcoming Location-Based iPhone MMORPG Shadow Cities
Grey Area, a new Finnish iPhone gaming startup (see our previous coverage), has been operating silently the past months, but now the firm has released a new teaser trailer and screenshots of their upcoming location-based MMORPG for iPhone called Shadow Cities. The game transforms the neighborhoods and familiar streets as part of the game world, visible to the player through iPhone. The tagline is "Your city is a game." The company promises the game will be available on the iTunes App Store in late 2010.
Hours Of War Launches New Version To 20 000 Registered Users
A new version of the game Hours of War, the MMORPG war game being created by Sauma Technologies, has just been launched. The game has not been out for very long and without any major advertising they have been able to add some 20 000 registered users on board already. We wrote in January that Sauma Technologies received a funding round of 500 000 euros and it seems this money has been put to good use. While there is obviously still a long way to go the development so far looks very promising.
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).
