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Games - Friday, August 1, 2008

iPhone Game Outfit Ng:moco Funded By Kleiner

Apple and AT&T are not the only companies that can make money off the iPhone. Kleiner Perkins and Maples Investments have put money to work in fledgling San Francisco-based iPhone games maker Ng:moco. It stands for "Next Generation MObile COmpany

The startup is led by former EA Blueprint head Neil Young – who was with EA for 11-years. He worked there for CEO Bing Gordon who is now with Kleiner Perkins and who has joined the board at Ng:moco.

Young says he isn't looking to develop games at Ng:moco, but rather to commission, finance, and produce titles.

Young told Gamasutra how he thinks Apple's forthcoming AppStore will rebalance the mobile gaming industry's reliance on carriers. The average revenue per user on mobile phones is "$7.50 or $8" compared to $45 on the PSP so there is a lot of upside he argues.

Says Young:
"The iPhone, from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it's got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it's location-aware, it's got all of your media on it, it's awake with you, it's always on, and it's always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it's got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.

And the last thing is the way in which Apple is reinventing the relationship between developers and publishers of software and the customers themselves. In the existing mobile games business, if you want to publish a game, you publish it through the carrier and the carrier deck."

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