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March 06, 2007
London's King.com Opens For Biz In Hollywood
Our sister site alarm:clock met with the founders of King.com as they were on an American tour. The social network for skill games has opened an office in Hollywood to continue the deal flow that it has been doing with makers of TV game shows.
The prevailing trend these days is for startups to figure out how to make money from video content on the Net. King.com is making a King's ransom using TV brands and themes but not their video. Rather it creates casual games based on TV shows.
This morning we did coffee the founders of the terribly successful, UK-founded casual gaming network King.com. They are in town for the Game Developers Conference, passing trough Las Vegas en route for a consultation with their lawyer.
King.com started out localizing standard casual games like Bejewled. The startup's initial angle was to localize for even small European countries and to employ social networking. Casual gaming had mostly been a solitaire practice but King grew by bringing in some wagering and pages/blogs where entrants can chest thump at taunt.
King.com raised a huge round of financing primarily from Apex ($34M Euros) as well as from Index Ventures. This represented a partial exit for the founders, who had launched the company in 2003. But it was also a war chest to enable the company to partner with popular game shows in Europe and in the US like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Deal or No Deal. These programs and their sites drive traffic to King.com created games.
King.com competes with the likes of EA's Pogo.com, Miniclip and Fun.com. But competition does not seem to have now slowed growth. King.com has 10M registered users who played 8M man hours of games in January and it growing at 800K new users per month. King.com did $13.8M in revenues last year and has been profitable since January 2005.
Germany is King.com's biggest country but the US is in 2nd place and its growing fast. King.com can only legally offer its games in 34 sites.
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Posted on March 6, 2007 05:45 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | Permalink
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