Tag: mobile gaming industry

Nix Hydra Inc. has raised millions to expand its successful game Egg Baby.

The mobile gaming Los Angeles-based startup, co-founded in 2012 by former Yale classmates Lina Chen and Naomi Ladizinsky, that creates mobile games made by females for females, has raised $5 million from Foundry Group to grow their popular game Egg Baby, as well as launch additional titles.

Egg Baby became a huge hit among young women without marketing.

The game was launched in 2013, was well received and gained quite the following among women and teen girls. The inspiration for Egg Baby came from a school experiment that assigned students to care for a raw egg as if it were their baby. Even though there was no marketing for the game and the initial version was quite rough, it was a hit.

In the game, a player hatches an egg, which produces a unique creature that gives gifts. The type of creature that hatches depends on how the player interacts and cares for the egg (ex. washes, dresses, feeds, tickles it, etc.). If the player forgets to care for the egg, it will die. A major reason why the game has achieved a massive following is players like to show off their creature and many new users download the game after seeing what their friends have shared.

The game has received 9 million downloads. “We didn’t think it was going to be that popular,” said Lina Chen. According to Chen, approximately 85 percent of players are female and the majority of players are under 25 years old.

Nix Hydra will continue its female-focused mobile gaming objective.

Naomi Ladizinsky commented that in the mobile gaming industry there have been a lot of games “with the same ideas iterated on over and over again”, such as games that fall into the trendy battle, quest, and runner game genres. “It’s a tech dude’s perspective,” she said. Nix Hydra anticipates it will hire an additional 20 people over the course of the next year and will use the funding it has received to launch two new games and develop a franchise around Egg Baby.

The company’s mobile games have been played by over 400 million users.

Storm8 Inc., the California-based company and the leading developer of social games for Android and iOS, has seen an increase in its mobile gaming network, which has two times the amount of users it did in the previous year.

Storm8 is excited about mobile games and the future.

According to the company’s chief executive Perry Tam, “We’ve been around for five years, and I’ve been extremely excited about how we’ve done in the last year. We believe that is an exciting achievement, and we are excited about the future of mobile gaming.”

On average, Storm8 has approximately 50 million active users per month and offers 40 free-to-play mobile games. For over 20 quarters the company has been profitable and its high earnings have allowed it to maintain a workforce of over 250 people.

Its recent milestone has occurred despite the fact that Storm8 is not a huge name in the mobile gaming industry. It hasn’t produced any major titles like Candy Crush Saga developed by King or Clash of the Clans from Supercell. Nevertheless, even though it has not reached this fame quiet yet, Tam has said that six of the company’s games are always in the top 100-grossing games on iOS. He said that for April’s top-grossing ranks, Storm8 was among the top 10 of the biggest game publishers.

Storm8’s mobile gaming plans include launching 12 new games in 2014.

The company publishes one game per month and intends to release 12 titles this year. While they mostly produce casual games, they also develop games that cover a range of diverse genres. Some of Storm8’s more popular titles are Bubble Mania, Dragon Story, Bingo! and Jewel Mania.

Storm8 has been profitable since 2009 when it was first established by Tam and others who once worked for social media giant, Facebook. At no point during its existence has outside funding ever been raised by the social gaming company.

A large number of its customers are from the United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe, but the majority of its customers are in Asia and in emerging markets. Tam commented that there are billions of mobile users and the company wants “to encapsulate as many of them as possible” by continuing to grow its mobile gaming network.