Games

Maija Palmer European technology funding April

May 8, 2012 7:20 pm by Maija Palmer

Funding Circle, a UK-based online marketplace where individuals lend directly to small businesses raised $16m of Series B financing from joint investors Index Ventures and US-based Union Square Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $21m.  Launched in August 2010, the company now facilitates around £1m in loans each week. The company is planning to use the funds to double its staff over the next year.

Dragonplay, a Tel Aviv-based games developer raised $14m in a Series A funding from Accel Partners.  Dragonplay specializes in makes card, casino and board games for smartphones and social networks and is best known for Live Holdem Poker Pro, which has more than 2m monthly active players.  The company will use the investment to expand its portfolio of games.

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Posted in Cleantech, Europe, Games, Internet, Tech, Tech Finance |

Chris Nuttall EA slams Zynga, backs next-gen consoles

May 8, 2012 1:54 am by Chris Nuttall

Electronic Arts has criticised its social gaming rival Zynga for paying high prices for “instant one-hit wonders” that give it a “temporary lead” in the charts.

John Riccitiello, chief executive, also used EA’s quarterly earnings call with analysts on Monday to argue the success of EA’s own digital and social strategy, defend falling subscriber numbers for its Star Wars online game and announce a big investment in next-generation console games. Details after the jump.

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Posted in Games, Social |
From Retail and Consumer March 23, 2012

This week’s launch of Angry Birds Space has propelled the mobile game’s Finnish developer, Rovio, into the stratosphere, instantly topping app store download charts around the world.

But whereas the original Angry Birds was a viral hit, notching up hundreds of millions of downloads with minimal marketing, this latest update landed in a marketing blitz more akin to a Disney blockbuster than a 99 cents mobile phone app.

Continue reading: “Angry Birds maker heads into space”

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Posted in Games |

Tim Bradshaw Minecraft makers Mojang notch up $80m revenues

March 23, 2012 5:54 pm by Tim Bradshaw

Although Angry Birds, by Rovio of Finland, is the best-known videogame to come out of Scandinavia, it has a close rival in Sweden’s Minecraft - a game Sean Parker loved so much he flew all its developers to London for a party.

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Posted in Digital media, Europe, Games, Tech |

Richard Waters Zynga bets $200m that Draw Something will become its next big franchise

March 21, 2012 8:57 pm by Richard Waters

Is Zynga hopelessly exposed to the hit-driven nature of the games business, or do its scale and business model give it a sustainable competitive edge?

Depending on your point of view, its acquisition on Wednesday of OMGPOP, maker of the red-hot game Draw Something, could be used to support either side of this argument.

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Posted in Games, Tech |

Chris Nuttall Zynga rival plans IPO, EA sees red ocean

March 9, 2012 7:33 am by Chris Nuttall

It’s nice to see social gaming companies being sociable with one another – employees of Wooga, the third largest on Facebook, were mingling happily at Zynga’s headquarters on Wednesday night during its Happy Hour as part of the 2012 Game Developers Conference, being held here in San Francisco this week.

Mark Pincus, Zynga chief executive, held an off-the-record dinner with we the media in another part of this rented building, which Zynga said on Monday it would now buy for $228m. I had on-the-record chats with Zynga’s three closest rivals Electronic Arts, Wooga and King.com on the fringes of GDC, with King.com’s CEO revealing its plans to join Zynga in going public. Highlights from those conversations after the jump.

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Posted in Games, Social |

Richard Waters WayIn and the race for the second screen

February 27, 2012 11:02 pm by Richard Waters

Thanks to a hint about Apple’s TV plans that Steve Jobs dropped to biographer Walter Isaacson, all eyes have been fixed on the revolution that may soon come to the dominant living room screen.

But a flurry of activity is already bringing big changes to the TV experience through “second screens” – and the $20m that has now been raised by Scott McNealy’s start-up WayIn is evidence that investors are paying attention. 

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Posted in Games, Internet, Tech |

Chris Nuttall Call of Duty takes big January hit

February 10, 2012 10:23 pm by Chris Nuttall

For anyone seeking holes in Activision’s seemingly bulletproof Call of Duty franchise, there was a chink in the armour exposed in NPD US January sales figures released late on Thursday.

Sales fell nearly 50 per cent year-on-year for the world’s best-selling video game in 2011 – that’s comparing the performance of the latest in the franchise – Modern Warfare 3 – with its predecessor, Black Ops.

Continue reading: “Call of Duty takes big January hit”

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Posted in Games |

Chris Nuttall The force is with digital, mobile games

February 2, 2012 10:28 pm by Chris Nuttall

Two trends clear in Facebook’s IPO filing on Wednesday were the inexorable rise in importance of digital-based gaming revenues and the growth in mobile – we learned Zynga was a key revenue-generator for Facebook and half of Facebook’s members were now users of its mobile products .

Earnings and data from Electronic Arts, THQ and Japan’s Gree over the past 24 hours further emphasise that the old order of disc-based console gaming will have a declining share of consumers’ attention, as consoles become more general entertainment boxes and smartphones and tablets proliferate.

Continue reading: “The force is with digital, mobile games”

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Posted in Games |

Chris Nuttall Wii needs U as sales plummet

January 14, 2012 12:53 am by Chris Nuttall

Nintendo was demonstrating its forthcoming Wii U next-generation console and Sony its PlayStation Vita handheld at CES in Vegas this week and they cannot come soon enough for the video game industry.

Cowen and Company analysts, mulling December’s NPD-collated US sales figures on Friday, described them as a Wii-saster, with a 42 per cent fall in Wii software dollar-sales year-on-year contributing to a 21 per cent overall industry decline in hardware, packaged software and accessory sales.

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Richard Waters, Chris Nuttall and April Dembosky in the FT's San Francisco bureau share their views - plus tech insights from Tim Bradshaw and Maija Palmer in London and Robin Kwong in Taipei.



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