Written on July 18, 2008 – 10:25 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember those good old days when you built cities? The early and tough beginning with the polluted ground, the first fire, and when you were in a bad mood: the riots, cyclones, and other disasters. Yeah, we used to be god back then, ruling our city with firm hand.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t touched SimCity for a while. I’m not even sure whether Matrix offers a Mac version. But some of you dear readers might have discovered CityLife, an online clone of Sim City - developed by Paris-based Monte Cristo.
This French independent game developer has raised €4.5 million from Arts Alliance, 360 degrees Capital Partners and Innoven Partenaires. The thirteen year-old company will use the newly acquired money for CITIES XL, Monte Cristo’s upcoming next-generation city-building online game. That means they’ll expand CityLife, maybe creating an even better game than SimCity.
I wish I could test the game for you, but I can’t. The risk of an addiction is too high. You don’t want to see your European tech news blog disappearing because of an online game, right?
I hope you like that post!
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Written on July 4, 2008 – 3:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Berlin-based game site GameDuell has raised €10.8 million in a second round of funding. The self-claimed largest game community of Germany received their first round from Holtzbrinck Ventures and Burda Digital Ventures in 2004 and now acquired new capital in series B - led by Wellington Partners.
The numbers of GameDuell are pretty impressive: the community has 10 million registered members who together play 200,000 games on a daily basis. Founders Boris Wasmuth, Kai Bolik, and Michael Kalkowski (see picture) claim to have more than 200 media partners - which rates them as the no. 3 online advertiser in Germany. The workforce of 80 employees is supposed to double before the end of this year.
So why is GameDuell so popular? Simple: users play against each other and have the chance to win serious cash prizes. The games are skill-focused - think Darts, Pool, Sudoku, Solitaire, and Mahjong -, so some governments don’t consider the games as gambling. For most people from countries where online gambling is forbidden, GameDuell offers a good alternative - since they can still win prizes. GameDuell offers localized site for visitors from US, UK, Spain, France, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Written on December 19, 2007 – 6:34 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic.
This week’s start-up is Mooh, a studio and developer of massive multiplayer games for casual audiences. The games are free, don’t need a plug-in, are cross platform and Flash-based and can be played from any web browser by thousands of players simultaneously. The company is an initiative of the Dutch companies Virtual Fairground, Ranj and Ex Machina.
We’re interviewing Maarten Brands, who has just left W!Games to focus on other projects, one of which is Mooh. He also co-founded a community and dating site for Christians, called Funky Fish and is working as a consultant for amongst others, the mobile start-up yoMedia.
Brands is a creative and strategic thinker who likes to do new things and start new initiatives: “I’m interested in a lot of stuff and I like to write which is why I studied Journalism - but I don’t blog -, although I quickly found out the whole news reporting thing wasn’t for me. I guess my main passions are the Arts, Games and Innovation.”
How did you guys come up with the idea for Mooh?
Mooh for me is the result of a lot of things. Frustration about the way the current ‘traditional’ retail games industry works, the rise of casual gaming audiences and their gaming preferences, the success of avatar-based social networking amongst teens, phenomena like World of Warcraft, the use of micro-payments etcetera.
If we can take away certain boundaries in terms of accessibility and available types of content, more people will play community games.
One thing in particular that stuck was the realization that the reason people play Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games and why they use social networking services is often for similar reasons. It’s about self-expression, status and communication. The gaming element just give people more fun things to do while they are hanging out on-line and more room for self-expression. If we can take away certain boundaries in terms of accessibility and available types of content, many, many more people will play community games.
The whole gaming industry is on its head at the moment, with different kinds of business models coming up and a new type of consumers entering the market. I see an opportunity for Mooh to really challenge current conventions. (more…)
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