[Germany] It seems that social gaming is where the action is right now, and we’re not just hearing that from the kids. Following Electronic Arts’ $300 million acquisition of Playfish, and the just-reported $43 million further investment that Playdom has raised, we’ve caught wind that Berlin-based wooga has secured €5 million ($7.5m) of additional funding. The round is being led by Balderton Capital, although earlier investor Holtzbrinck Ventures has also participated.
Wooga (world of gaming) launched in January this year and has, to-date, focused solely on the Facebook platform with the release of Brain Buddies in July. The game is currently listed as one of the top twenty titles on Facebook, for which the company claims 6 million monthly users. Two further games are in the last stages of development wooga tells us and should be released in the next few weeks. No confirmation, however, on which social network these will be for but our guess is Facebook again (a current job advert certainly points in that direction).
Talking of staff, the company employs 25 people from 9 different countries and says it will use the additional funding to hire new talent – the list of current vacancies is quite extensive – and to grow the company further. That said, with only one Facebook game released so far and two in the pipeline, €5 million is quite the endorsement. Did we mention that social gaming is hot right now?
Business Model? 5 million funding for 1 game? Are we seeing the third bubble grow and burst soon? Do we ever learn from the past? Odd…
why on earth do you need 25 People for a game like brain buddies ? i could do something like that with 5 people in 2 month…
5 million is a large sum for a small company like this, wonder how much stake the investors got for their money
I think you are missing the point that this isnt the only game they are working on.
still those are lame flash games…many professional game studios working on “real” games for consoles and pc have less employees than that. But whatever, hope they can build something out of that money.
social gaming companies like zynga have more than 150 employees for their flash games. it’s a growing industry and surprisingly, there are more casual gamers than there are “real” gamers if you look at the numbers.
zynga has near 100M users in total and a already a bunch of games in total but yeah, its a growing market i know
These software product development companies must be the ones that have experience on German as a language for coding and communication.
Language does make a difference on the total cost of development. But the right offshore outsourcing strategy can make a difference too. So, yes, Barrick and kayoone, the investors should have looked at other cheaper options.
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