MMOG-meets-casual game developer Ohai gets funding

January 23, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

Ohai, a company that is trying to combine casual social gaming (Facebook applications) with massive multi-player online games (World of Warcraft), has raised an undisclosed amount from August Capital and Rustic Canyon Partners.

The San Mateo company isn’t saying much more than that, except that it’s hiring engineers. For now, the most notable thing is that it is founded by some well-known names in traditional and casual game development. Company bios below:

Scott Hartsman, VP Production. Scott has led the production of MMOs that have totaled over $1B in aggregate revenue. He has been a leader in the MMO space since the early Gemstone days. Most recently, he was Executive Producer and Creative Director at Sony Online Entertainment where he led development of projects such as Everquest II and Everquest.

Don Neufeld, VP Engineering.  Don is a rock star, a MMO technical genius.  He was most recently Technical Director at Sony Online Entertainment, where he shipped 15 products including Everquest II and Planetside (still the only successful FPS – first person shooter – MMO.)

Blake Commagere, CTO. Blake was a pioneer and helped invent the social games category on social networks. Previously, he was a cofounder at Mogad, lead engineer at Causes (Facebook Causes), and a senior engineer at Plaxo. Blake can do finger pull ups.

Susan Wu, CEO. Former venture capitalist, serial entrepreneur.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • JFamie
    Hmmm. Wonder how many business plans from over the years that certain people had access to because of their position and board seats were used as a basis for this company. Just asking...
  • I read from another article that they're developing flash-based MMORPGs... very interesting business model as we've seen flash players develop quite fast over recent years.

    Can't wait to see what Ohai comes up with!
  • Mike
    Casual games and MMORPGs are opposite poles on the spectrum in terms of level of required engagement, attention, commitment, etc. They're antithetical. The far greater market opportunity is in casual games (e.g., witness Wii, Scrabulous, etc.) and the research shows people prefer to play casual games with their family & closest friends, not strangers (which MMORPGs must play to, of course, given the way they're designed). XBox Live has supported several casual titles where users can challenge strangers online but these have not been very successful.

    Also, of course games are a Hollywood, hits-driven business. The reason Blake was successful on Facebook was that he was able to quickly iterate & modify game engines (witness Vampires begets Zombies). Analogy: small, indie films. Putting all their wood behind just one massive game environment sounds a very risky business model and strange that the normally conservative August Capital would bite at this.

    Note, Susan came from Charles River Ventures but why didn't they choose to invest? Kinda concerning...