“This fund combines the expertise CrowdStar has in social gaming metrics and design with YouWeb’s ability to select entrepreneurial talent,” said Peter Relan, CrowdStar’s chief executive. “We’ve done social games for many years and that’s why our very first real title did well overnight.” YouWeb is Relan’s incubator and it spawned CrowdStar along with OpenFeint, which was bought by GREE earlier this year for $104 million. YouWeb remains the largest stakeholder in CrowdStar.
You Web社は、Relanのインキュベーター(起業支援者)であり、今年の前半にGree社に1億400万ドルで買収されたOpenFeint社とともにCrowdStar社を生み出しました。You Web社は今なおCrowdStar社の最大の株主です。
What CrowdStar is asking for in return in terms of ownership and licensing is negotiable and determined on a case-by-case basis, Relan said. “This is not a factory approach to churning out startups,” he said.
There are probably a couple of forces driving the creation of these game funds and contests. When Apple cracked down on incentivized installs earlier this year, it didn’t ban developers from cross-promoting their own games — even if they involve virtual currency rewards for downloads. So gaming companies in response are looking for third-party titles they can either own a partial stake in or publish. Then they can use them to serve interstitial ads for their own games.
おそらく、ファンドや競争がゲーム業界でこのように生み出されている背景には、複数の原動力が存在する。今年、Apple がインセンティブ(景品)付きのインストールを厳重に取り締った際、開発者が自分自身のゲームを宣伝する行為は、ダウンロードとひきかえに仮想通貨がもらえる類いのものであっても、禁じられなかった。よって、ゲーム会社はそれに反応して、投資の一部を所有もしくは公開できる、サードパーティのタイトルを探している。そうすれば、自分自身のゲームのためのすきま広告を供給するのに使えるからだ。
Secondarily, not all companies in the mobile gaming space have the capital to make outright acquisitions. Zynga — one of the exceptions — reported $965.6 million in cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet at the end of the first quarter of this year, and it’s used that to buy 15 companies in the past 13 months. With its forthcoming IPO, it will have much more liquid market for its shares, which will help out with acquisitions too. EA has also been very acquisitive in the space with smaller deals like Chillingo and Firemint. It used a $550 million bridge loan to buy PopCap Games for up to $1.3 billion, it said last week.
But for everyone else who doesn’t have that sort of scale or revenue, contests and funds may be a more capital efficient way of competing with giants like EA, Zynga and Gameloft for sourcing new intellectual property. TinyCo was the first to kick off the trend, using $5 million from its revenues and the $18 million it recently raised from Andreessen Horowitz to finance games from third-party developers. Glu also has a development contest for which it will award up to $500,000. South Korea’s Gamevil, which has been publishing titles from small, independent studios for some time, also announced a $10 million fund.
Can I make a correction on the first sentence? Sorry.
Wrong:CrowdStar社 のソーシャルゲームの測定に関する専門知識と、You Web社のデザインを組み合わせ、起業家の才能を見出している
Correct:CrowdStar社 のソーシャルゲームの測定と設計に関する専門知識と、You Web社の起業家の才能を見出す力を結び付けている