Electronic Arts
It's a long shot, and there's a lot of competition. But the Linkoping, Sweden-based company has done well enough so far in online soccer games to be taken seriously. Its Power Challenge and ManagerZone games have more than 7 million registered users, about 600,000 of whom are active on a monthly basis.
"EA is very big, but the downside of being big is that you can be slow," said Frank Sagnier, chief executive of Power Challenge, in an interview.
The company plans to expand beyond soccer games to other sports in the U.S. market with casual games you can play during a lunch break. The idea is to create exciting 3-D sports games that you can play simply by logging into a web site. You can build your team and then compete in short games against other sports fans. The games are free to play, but the company makes money through virtual goods transactions, advertising, and club memberships. It's adding new features, such as career progression, to keep players coming back.
The company brought in Robin Kaminsky, a former high-ranking publishing executive at Activision Blizzard, as a board member and advisor on how to manage the U.S. market expansion.
Power Challenge was formed in 2001 by Johan Christenson, an Internet entrepreneur who founded three previous game companies. Sagnier joined in March to take the company's games and "turn them into a great business." (Sagnier was a former European executive for in-game ad firm Double Fusion, and he spent eight years working at EA.) Now Power Challenge has 35 employees and raised $ 8 million from Benchmark Capital in 2007.
That's good backing for a startup, but the company is puny compared to monstrous competition. Electronic Arts is operating a FIFA Online soccer game in Asia and could painlessly expand it to other territories. Other rivals in online sports games include Empire of Sports, Cybersports' Football Superstars, and QuickHit.
For the team management game, rivals include Hattrick, Championship Manager and Football Manager. But while the rivals often have heavy-duty download requirements, Power Challenge tries to make do with a light 1.5 megabyte download that can be transferred in seconds on a broadband connection.
Sagnier said the company's games are easily accessible, but hard to master. Whereas other games such as Empire of Sports let you control a single character, you control an entire team in Power Challenge's games. Sagnier is hopeful he can take on the big rival EA with partnerships.
The company has some key distribution deals with gaming portals such as Miniclip, Spil Games, Fox Sports, Televisa, Goal.com, Sky Games, Sporx, and UOL. Those deals have helped it grow to four million games played a month, compared to just 2.5 million games in January, even as other game traffic falls off in the recession.