An Interest In:
Web News this Week
- March 28, 2024
- March 27, 2024
- March 26, 2024
- March 25, 2024
- March 24, 2024
- March 23, 2024
- March 22, 2024
Some of Our Sources
View All SourcesHelp Webnuz
Referal links:
February 19, 2013 10:00 pm GMT
Now that the number of tablet and smartphone gamers outnumber console players, there’s a race to see who will establish the big franchises and gaming companies of the mobile generation. In the early years of the iOS platform, makers of basic simulation games experimented with making their apps free, giving rise to several nine-figure-a-year businesses.But other genres like first-person shooters have stayed with the paid app strategy. Brands like Gameloft’s Modern Combat and Activision’s Call of Duty have remained in the $5 to 10 range, although the freemium model has taken off for many other kinds of games. A Beijing-based company called Cmune is betting that first-person shooters can be a nine-figure-a-year business too, and they’re taking another slug of funding from DCM’s Android fund to prove it. They’re not disclosing the amount, however. “Every other platform has multi-billion-dollar, first-person shooter franchises, and there hasn’t been one yet on tablets,” said Benjamin Joffe, a founding partner at the company. Cmune is the maker of UberStrike, a game that’s passed 10 million registered users on multiple platforms, including Facebook and the Mac App Store. They have a paid version of the app now, but they’ll soon make it free once they iron out kinks in the game play. Joffe says that while Facebook is known for your stereotypical city-builder or farm game, UberStrike is the largest first-person shooter game on the social network. The company will face a number of formidable competitors, including Battlefield-maker Electronic Arts and of course, Gameloft and Activision. Ben Cousins, an EA, Dice and Ngmoco veteran, has been showing off a free-to-play first-person shooter called The Drowning in recent weeks as well. Zynga has also recently been dabbling in first-person shooters after they published a multiplayer mobile game last December called The Respawnables. Joffe said UberStrikes tablet app will stand out because of multi-player mode. Theyve taken care to match players against players on similar platforms, so that desktop-based gamers dont have an unfair advantage over mobile ones. The Beijing-based startup was founded back in 2007 by Shaun Lelacheur Sales and Ludovic Bodin, who had no prior history in gaming. They stumbled into gaming after some early experiments with communication apps. They were thinking about building some kind of 3D version of Skype, after Sales had published a reference book on the 3D engine Virtools. It was almost an accident that one of their prototypes was a
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/qSxD-uH_QRY/
Cmune Takes DCM Funding To Build A Billion Dollar First-Person-Shooter Franchise on Mobile
Now that the number of tablet and smartphone gamers outnumber console players, there’s a race to see who will establish the big franchises and gaming companies of the mobile generation. In the early years of the iOS platform, makers of basic simulation games experimented with making their apps free, giving rise to several nine-figure-a-year businesses.But other genres like first-person shooters have stayed with the paid app strategy. Brands like Gameloft’s Modern Combat and Activision’s Call of Duty have remained in the $5 to 10 range, although the freemium model has taken off for many other kinds of games. A Beijing-based company called Cmune is betting that first-person shooters can be a nine-figure-a-year business too, and they’re taking another slug of funding from DCM’s Android fund to prove it. They’re not disclosing the amount, however. “Every other platform has multi-billion-dollar, first-person shooter franchises, and there hasn’t been one yet on tablets,” said Benjamin Joffe, a founding partner at the company. Cmune is the maker of UberStrike, a game that’s passed 10 million registered users on multiple platforms, including Facebook and the Mac App Store. They have a paid version of the app now, but they’ll soon make it free once they iron out kinks in the game play. Joffe says that while Facebook is known for your stereotypical city-builder or farm game, UberStrike is the largest first-person shooter game on the social network. The company will face a number of formidable competitors, including Battlefield-maker Electronic Arts and of course, Gameloft and Activision. Ben Cousins, an EA, Dice and Ngmoco veteran, has been showing off a free-to-play first-person shooter called The Drowning in recent weeks as well. Zynga has also recently been dabbling in first-person shooters after they published a multiplayer mobile game last December called The Respawnables. Joffe said UberStrikes tablet app will stand out because of multi-player mode. Theyve taken care to match players against players on similar platforms, so that desktop-based gamers dont have an unfair advantage over mobile ones. The Beijing-based startup was founded back in 2007 by Shaun Lelacheur Sales and Ludovic Bodin, who had no prior history in gaming. They stumbled into gaming after some early experiments with communication apps. They were thinking about building some kind of 3D version of Skype, after Sales had published a reference book on the 3D engine Virtools. It was almost an accident that one of their prototypes was aOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/qSxD-uH_QRY/
Share this article:
Tweet
View Full Article
Techcrunch
TechCrunch is a leading technology blog, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.More About this Source Visit Techcrunch