Over $350M invested into social games, VWs, casual MMOs & games
Tracking VC funding deals is a great way to keep a pulse on what’s considered HOT in any given market. VCs start investing when the market starts showing real promise – for major profits in 4-7 year time horizon. As a rule of thumb, VCs are looking for deals where they could make 10x their original investment. So, if there is a number of VCs investing into a segment, you can be sure it is HOT.
Everyplay’s market segment is the mix of social games, virtual worlds, casual MMO and casual games. space. Tracking the VC deals shows continued validation for this market, which what you would expect when the user figures continue to grow very rapidly. Everyplay is also likely to seek out VC funding eventually, so it is important to us to know which VCs are active, what kind of deals are happening and how much money is being raised.
The table shown below is compiled from my own research into these VC deals. It is by no means 100% comprehensive. First caveat: it is rather US focused as the PR machine works best there. VentureBeat, Virtual Worlds Management and the usual suspects TechCrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable do a good job in covering these deals. As Europe is almost completely under-represented and a lot of early stage deals don’t get publicized at all (regardless of where they happen), I’m sure I’m missing a whole of VC deals from this list.
When interpreting the top line figure of $350 million, you should note that half of it was invested into two companies: 9You ($100 million) and Big Fish Games ($87 million). Regardless, it is clear that the VC activity in this space is constant at a roughly “2-5$ million invested a week” level.
The deals
Venture capital funding for social games, virtual world, casual MMO and casual games. Updated 21th Sep 2009.
Date | Company | Invested | Type | Series | Country | Lead investor |
Sep-08 | Challenge Games |
$10,0
|
Social games | Series B | USA | Globespan Capital Partners |
Sep-08 | Big Fish Games |
$83,0
|
Casual games | Series A | USA | Balderton Capital |
Sep-08 | Hollywood Interactive |
$5,0
|
Social games | Unknown | USA | BlueRun Ventures |
Sep-08 | RobotGalaxy |
$5,0
|
Virtual World | Series B | USA | Bachmann Industries |
Aug-08 | Nonoba |
1,3 €
|
Casual games | Series A | DK | Mangrove Capital Partners |
Aug-08 | LOLapps |
$4,5
|
Social apps | Series A | USA | Polaris Venture Partners |
Aug-08 | Webcarrz |
$4,0
|
Social games | Series A | USA | Meakem Becker Venture Capital |
Aug-08 | Knowledge Adventure |
$5,0
|
Virtual World | Unknown | USA | Azure Capital Partners |
Aug-08 | Dizzywood |
$1,0
|
Virtual World | Series B | USA | European Founders Fund |
Jul-08 | Challenge Games |
$4,5
|
Social games | Series A | USA | Sequoia Capital |
Jul-08 | Zynga |
$29,0
|
Social games | Series B | USA | Kleiner Perkins |
Jul-08 | Playfish |
$1,0
|
Social games | Bridge | UK | Accel Partners |
Jul-08 | Gaia Interactive |
$11,0
|
Casual MMO | Series C | USA | Institutional Venture Partners |
Jul-08 | Six Degrees Games |
$7,0
|
Virtual World | Series A | USA | Prism VentureWorks & Clearstone |
Jul-08 | Social Gaming Network |
$3,0
|
Social games | Unknown | USA | Jeff Bezos Expeditions |
Jul-08 | Riot Games |
$7,0
|
Casual games | Unknown | USA | Benchmark Capital |
Jul-08 | 8D World |
$1,0
|
Casual MMO | Series A | USA | Spark Capital |
Jun-08 | I’m in like with you |
$1,5
|
Social games | Series B | USA | Spark Capital |
May-08 | Social Gaming Network |
$15,0
|
Social games | Series A | USA | Greylock Partners |
Apr-08 | Serious Business Inc |
$4,0
|
Social games | Series A | USA | Lightspeed Ventures |
Apr-08 | Kongregate |
$3,0
|
Casual games | Series B | USA | Jeff Bezos Expeditions |
Apr-08 | Akoha |
$2,0
|
Mixed reality social game | Seed | USA | Multiple angels |
?.2008 | Playfish |
$3,0
|
Social games | Seed | UK | Accel Partners |
?.2008 | RobotGalaxy |
$7,0
|
Virtual World | Series A | USA | Bachmann Industries |
?.2008 | Hangout Industries |
$6,0
|
Virtual World | Series A | USA | Polaris Venture Partners & Highland Capital Partners |
Q1/2008 | 9You |
$100,0
|
Virtual World/Casual Games | Unknown | China | Temasek Holdings |
Q1/2008 | Chapatiz |
$0,5
|
Virtual World | Seed | French | Angel Investors |
Q1/2008 | Dizzywood |
$1,0
|
Virtual World | Series A | USA | Shelby Bonnie |
Q1/2008 | EveryScape |
$7,0
|
Mirror World | Series B | USA | Dace Ventures |
Q1/2008 | Fluid Entertainment |
$3,2
|
Virtual World | Series A | USA | Trinity Ventures |
Q1/2008 | Handipoints |
$0,8
|
Virtual World | Seed | USA | Charles River Ventures |
Q1/2008 | Metaversum |
several m€
|
Mirror World | Unknown | USA | Balderton Capital |
Q1/2008 | Numedeon |
$1,0
|
Portfolio of Virtual Worlds | Series B | USA | BankInter’s Venture Capitol Group |
Q1/2008 | Sparkplay Media |
$4,3
|
Casual MMO | Series A | USA | Redpoint Ventures & Prism VentureWorks |
Mar-08 | Alamofire |
$2,0
|
Social games | Series A | USA | Founder’s fund |
Mar-08 | PopJax |
$4,7
|
Social games | Series A | USA | Draper Fisher Jurvetson |
Feb-08 | Flowplay |
$3,7
|
Hybrid MMO / casual games | Series A | USA | Intel Capital |
Feb-08 | RocketOn |
$5,0
|
Social Games | Series A | USA | D.E. Shaw Group |
Jan-08 | Zynga |
$10,0
|
Social games | Series A | USA | Union Square Ventures |
Jan-08 | Rebel Monkey |
$1,0
|
Casual MMO | Series A | USA | Redpoint Ventures |
Dec-07 | Playfirst |
$16,5
|
Casual games | Series C | USA | DCM |
Nov-07 | Apaja Online |
1,7 €
|
Casual games | Series A | Finland | Martinson Trigon Venture Partners |
Oct-07 | GameLayers |
$0,5
|
Social games | Series A | USA | O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures |
Sep-07 | Watercooler |
$4,0
|
Social games | Series A | USA | Canaan partners |
Sep-07 | RocketOn |
$0,8
|
Social Games | Seed | USA | Unknown |
Aug-07 | Kongregate |
$5,0
|
Casual games | Series A | USA | Greylock Partners |
Aug-07 | D2C |
$6,0
|
Casual games | Series A | USA | Rubicon Ventures |
Aug-07 | Conduit Labs |
$5,5
|
Social games | Series A | USA | Charles River Ventures & Prism VentureWorks |
Jul-07 | Three Rings |
$3,5
|
Hybrid MMO / casual games | Series B |
USA | True Ventures |
Mar-07 | Flowplay |
$0,5
|
Hybrid MMO / casual games | Seed | USA | Angels |
Mar-07 | Gaia Interactive |
$12,0
|
Casual MMO | Series B | USA | Benchmark Capital |
Dec-06 | Metaplace |
$5,0
|
Casual MMO platform | Series A | USA | Charles River Ventures |
Dec-06 | D2C |
$1,5
|
Casual games | Seed | USA | Rubicon Ventures |
Jul-06 | Sulake |
6 €
|
Virtual World | Series C? | Finland | Movida Group |
?.2006 | WeeWorld |
$15,5
|
Virtual World | Series B | UK | Accel Partners |
Jan-05 | Big Fish Games |
$8,7
|
Casual games | Angels | USA | Multiple angels, two rounds |
Jan-05 | Sulake |
18 €
|
Virtual World | Series B? | Finland | Benchmark Capital |
?.2005 | WeeWorld |
$5,5
|
Virtual World | Series A | UK | Benchmark Capital |
2000 – 2004 | Sulake |
? €
|
Virtual World | Seed to Series A | Finland | 3i, Elisa & Taivas |
Notes and commentary
- Charles River Ventures spoke prominently for this segment, especially their partner Susan Wu did a lot to promote the segment in year 2007. Susan left CRV earlier in 2008 to join Ohai, a stealth online gaming company, and CRV’s public profile has been a lot more quiet since.
- Lightspeed Venture Partners is active and very prominent thanks to their partner Jeremy Liew, who has probably one of the best blogs about this segment.
- SGN and Zynga are locked in a deadmatch to own the social games space. Good for companies looking to be acquired.
- EDIT (2008-09-25): I originally reported Sulake‘s investment as 22 M€, which was from Kauppalehti, the leading Finnish business magazine, who had calculated the total losses incurred by Sulake from its founding in year 2000 to end of year 2007 using public records. The Series B and C rounds already amount to 24 M€, and the Seed – Series A is definitely several million euros, so it wouldn’t be a big leap to guess that the total investment would be around 30 M€
- EDIT (2008-09-24): I mistakenly reported a series B for Apaja‘s, which hasn’t happened. The table above has been corrected.
- EDIT 2 (2008-09-25): Corrected funding for Akoha to 2 M$, corrected lead investor for SGN’s 15 M$ round to be Greylock Partners
- EDIT 3 (2008-09-25): Corrected funding for Conduit to 5,5 M$, corrected Sulake’s founding rounds, added Hangout industries, added investors for Conduit, Sparkplay and Six Degrees, corrected Metaplace’s funding date to Dec-06.
- I’ve omitted skill gaming, pureplay publishers/operators, core gaming (e.g. like Trion World Network, which has raised over $100 million), middleware and other related industries to try to focus on developers and self-publishing companies.
This entry was posted on September 24, 2008 at 10:36 and is filed under research. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: business, casualgames, casualMMO, socialgames, virtualworlds
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September 24, 2008 at 19:48
A couple of additions to Sulake funding from the press releases:
Jan-05: Benchmark Capital $23.5 million
http://www.sulake.com/press/releases/2005-01-19-Benchmark_Capital_invests_in_Sulake
Jul-06: Movida Group 6 M€ ($7.65 million)
http://www.sulake.com/press/releases/2006-07-10-Movida_Group_invest_EUR_6_million_in_Habbo
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/habbo-hotel-parent-sulake-gets-765-million-funding
September 25, 2008 at 07:59
Hi Jussi,
Great chart and thanks for including Akoha on the list. Small correction, we have actually only raised $2.0 million for Akoha not the $3 million listed.
Also we aren’t developing a virtual world, but rather a reality based social game played in the real world.
Thanks for the great list and post.
September 25, 2008 at 08:15
Thanks Jussil for the kind words.
Note that although we think the SGN guys are terrific, Lightspeed did not invest in them, Greylock did.
Cheers
J
September 25, 2008 at 08:26
[…] Jussi Laakkonen also notes from the same source: Sulake’s 22 M€ [of investment from 3i] is [quoted] from Kauppalehti, the leading Finnish business magazine, which calculated the total losses incurred by Sulake from its founding in year 2000 to end of year 2007 using public records. VC money raised is more than this. […]
September 25, 2008 at 11:08
Austin & Jeremy,
many thanks for the corrections! I’ve edited the table and included the edit on the notes.
Austin, I really enjoyed your TechCrunch pitch. I love ambitious projects and yours is not only ambitious but also noble. Best of luck with it!
September 25, 2008 at 11:28
[…] Laakkonen of social gaming stealth startup Everyplay has a great post tracking investment in the social games and virtual worlds space. The simple message – there […]
September 25, 2008 at 18:45
Thanks for doing the research! Couple of corrections/additions that I noticed:
– Conduit Labs raised $5.5m, not $5m. And it was a split round between Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks
– Sparkplay was a Redpoint & Prism VentureWorks deal.
– The puts Prism VentureWorks with the same # of deals in the space as CRV and more than Lightspeed.
– Six Degrees had Clearstone in as a major investor (maybe majority) as well
– Hangout Industries is missing.. Highland & Polaris invested, Virtual World thing
hmm.. that’s all I got right now. :)
September 25, 2008 at 21:18
Nabeel, many thanks for the corrections. I’ve now included them on the table above.
September 25, 2008 at 21:44
Three Rings’ round led by True was a Series B.
Great table!
September 26, 2008 at 11:30
Daniel, thanks for the correction!
September 26, 2008 at 12:47
Great list Jussi!
I’d like to add two interesting girl gaming related investments:
Stardoll.com – Index Ventures – $4m – Feb 06
WatAgame (gosupermodel.com) – Accel Partners – $4m – Jul 07
I’ll send you some more later :)
September 26, 2008 at 21:13
While we don’t necessarily think of ourselves as a gaming company, it’s nice to be included! Nice work.
I would also add to your list Outspark, who raised $11MM from DCM and Tencent in Jan ’08.
September 27, 2008 at 14:32
Kevin, if I understand correctly, Outspark is a pureplay operator, that brings over Korean casual MMOs for the US market. With this list I wanted to focus on companies that self-publish (develop and publish/operate) titles. The definition is somewhat blurry though.
Joakim, I’ll add those two to the list shortly.
September 29, 2008 at 17:07
Hi Jussi,
Good list. Erepublik.com also raised 550,000€ in an angel round in June 2008. For full details:http://www.erepublik.com/inmedia.html
tks
A
September 29, 2008 at 19:13
[…] In case you had not noticed, there is an avalanche of deals this year around the social gaming and virtual world’s area. Some recent investment rounds like the Big Fish Games one are very large (83 million $). Fellow entrepreneur Jussi Laakkonen did a list of a lot of the deals on his blog here. […]
September 30, 2008 at 12:16
[…] this months sales figures (the usual corporate and business need), but can we grow this over time. Jussi Laakkonen blogs about the US$350M invested in VW’s, Social Media here. It is correctly pointed out that much of the list is US based. One of the reasons we started […]
September 30, 2008 at 17:07
[…] posted an excellent writeup of how there’s been over $350 million invested in social games etc worldwide, and commented that he the European side wasn’t really included in his […]
September 30, 2008 at 17:09
You inspired me to dig out, clean up, and re-format my own compiled data and split out the EU-only investments.
I’ve cloned your presentation format (almost – I hadn’t recorded which VC firms had done each investment) for clarity – http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/09/30/over-150m-invested-in-europe-into-social-games-vws-casual-mmos-games/
October 1, 2008 at 09:23
[…] Laakkonen compiled a list of VCs investing over $350M invested into social games, VWs, casual MMOs & games which gives a nice insight of what's happening there. Adam from T-machine tried the same thing […]
October 2, 2008 at 03:38
Nice list! What’s with the math, though? By my quick count you’re showing more than US$480M+ total. (Not including anything from Adam’s link — some of which may be double counts). 9You & Big Fish are still a big part, but more like 40% of total.
October 2, 2008 at 13:51
Jim, the list is not nearly comprehensive and there are most likely rounding errors in many places as well as misreported figures (some fundings are reported differently by different news outlets), so I gravitated towards round numbers to emphasize that these figures are approximates not 100% accurate.
October 6, 2008 at 16:13
[…] Over $350M invested into social games, virtual worlds, casual MMOs and games […]
October 22, 2008 at 21:34
[…] Tracking VC funding deals is a way to determine what’s considered hot in a given market. VC firms try to predict where they can make profits and start investing when the market starts showing real promise for major profits in 4-7 years. Recently, venture capital funding for social games, virtual worlds, casual MMO and casual games increased considerably, in Europe and the world. […]
November 17, 2008 at 17:50
[…] a month ago I published a list of $350 million invested in year 2008 into virtual worlds, casual MMOs, and casual & social games. The blog post got a […]
November 18, 2008 at 17:12
[…] the sector in which my company Everyplay operates. My earlier post on this sector was titled “$350 million invested this year“, and with latest data that figure needs to be upped to $481 […]
December 19, 2008 at 20:13
[…] is the sector in which my company Everyplay operates. My earlier post on this sector was titled “$350 million invested this year“, and with latest data that figure needs to be upped to $481 […]
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