Kabam Receives $30M to Grow Multiplayer Games
Kabam has announced today the $30 million funding in massively multiplayer social games so as to carry out its strategic plans. The participating investors are Redpoint Ventures, Intel Capital and Canaan Partners, the latter having provided mentorship for Kabam in its early days.
“Kabam has pursued a distinctly different strategy than other social game companies. Rather than target ‘casual’ players, we are focused on creating a new segment of games that appeal to a more core gamer demographic,” said Kevin Chou, CEO of Kabam.
“Our market success to date demonstrates that our strategy of creating this new segment of massively multiplayer social games is really resonating with players. This infusion of capital enables us to further our aggressive growth plans as we continue to hire the industry’s best engineering and creative talent and seek appropriate acquisition and partnership opportunities in the technology, team, and product areas.”
Kabam’s plans of creating a new trend in social games have turned investors on, especially Redpoint. Kabam has seen explosive growth as a company, starting with 20 employees at the beginning of 2010, expanding to over 200 a year later. With further plans for expansion, Kabam is in high credit with managers previously employed by EA, Blizzard, Google, Inuit, PayPal and Lucasfilm.
The investment in social mobile gaming is a big trend at the moment as Apple, Google and Intel are making serious efforts to develop in this domain. Chip maker Intel, for example, has regained focus on social gaming after a decrease in PC sales, by launching SandyBridge, a combo chip optimized for gaming devices. Moreover, Intel has also invested $3 million in OpenFeint, the social mobile game platform that has attracted by now considerable funding from numerous investors.
Google, on the other side, has secretly invested $100 million in Zynga, the social game developer, with the purpose of attracting Zynga’s constant players. Currently, Zynga has 184 million players, and much of its popularity is owed to its partnership with Facebook that has hundreds of million users.
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