South Korea’s Gamevil Launches $10 Million Fund to Find Game Developer Partners
Here’s an interesting trend. Yet another mobile gaming company, Gamevil, has launched a multimillion dollar fund to find small studios to partner with and distribute games on behalf of.
South Korea’s Gamevil said it will invest up to $10 million in external partners to build a strong lineup of smartphone gaming titles. This follows on TinyCo’s move to build out a $5 million fund, Glu Mobile’s $500,000 mobile-social gaming contest and we might throw in Tapjoy’s recent $5 million fund for porting games to Android for good measure (even though they’re not technically a game developer).
To hedge the risks of a hits driven business, many of the biggest mobile gaming companies are looking for tiny studios to work with and expand their portfolio of titles. Gamevil has found a few successes this way — namely with its paid hit Air Penguin, which was developed by a six-person South Korean outfit called Enterfly and earned more than $1 million in revenue in its first month. Gamevil said it also recently acquired exclusive publishing and partial intellectual property rights to the ‘Cartoon Wars’ series.
The benefits of this model are two-fold. Not only do the bigger companies get the extra revenue from titles built by third-parties, they also gain a larger userbase to which they can cross-promote titles developed in-house later.
July 15th, 2011 at 3:58 pm
[...] also comes at a time when many mobile gaming companies like TinyCo, Glu Mobile and Gamevil have launched funds or contests to find promising IP from third-party developers. It’s [...]
July 17th, 2011 at 8:36 am
[...] also comes at a time when many mobile gaming companies like TinyCo, Glu Mobile and Gamevil have launched funds or contests to find promising IP from third-party developers. It’s partially [...]
September 19th, 2011 at 1:22 pm
[...] currency, the game is credited to South Korean mobile games publisher Gamevil, which started at $10 million fund to invest in external game development partners back in June. Destinia was released September [...]
October 17th, 2011 at 9:13 am
[...] South Korea’s Gamevil announced a $10 million fund four months ago and has been doing one to two deals a month since then. Today it announced it’s investing in RPG-maker KNetP, which may ultimately help bolster its core line of RPG titles like Zenonia. KNetP makes two popular Korean RPGs “Legend of Master” and “LAR.” With the deal, Gamevil gets the ability to publish those and future titles from KNetP. [...]
November 14th, 2012 at 11:53 am
[...] attributes the growth to the company’s $10 million investment in the Partner Fund, which helps external and third party partners to build a strong lineup of smartphone gaming [...]