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Games - Friday, September 12, 2008

Big Fish Games' Investment Haul at $83M

We have been impressed with Seattle's Big Fish Games for some time but this investment round is still a surprise. The casual online game portal has raised $83.3M in 2nd-round funding from Balderton Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Salmon River Capital. It had raised around $8M in angel funding.

Big Fish says it now serves up over 1M games per day. The company makes money through the trial to pay model whereby users get an hour of free game play and after that are charged $20. The typical conversion rate runs at about 2%. They also run advertising.

The Seattle PI reports that BigFish did $8.6M in revenue in 2005, then $24.1M in 2006 and $50.8M last year.

The accommodate expected growth, BigFish has moved into a new 57K-square-foot office and expects to increase headcount to as much as 450 employees, and the company currently lists more than 60 open positions. The company needs a lot of people as it not only has to manage development of new games but there are new channels for growth including mobile.

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