SGN aims for cross-platform social gaming domination
Last year, SGN made a bet that social gaming would transcend any one platform, and it aggressively expanded from its core group of gaming applications on Facebook to building games for the iPhone. Even though many rivals have gotten bigger than SGN on Facebook, it has surpassed them on the iPhone while maintaining key games on Facebook. Now, it looks set to take advantage of its cross-platform reach.
The first of SGN’s bets paid off in… Continue Reading
iPhone game developers rejoice at Apple’s latest update plans
There were a lot of happy game developers among the 200 or so people who attended Thursday’s iGames Summit in San Francisco, which was devoted to iPhone games.
Speakers at the summit, including game developers such as Tapulous, ngmoco, Booyah, Demiforce, Zynga and Social Gaming Network, were excited about Apple’s announcement that its iPhone 3.0 update, coming this summer, would have a number of game-friendly features: a virtual goods platform, Bluetooth multiplayer, and peer-to-peer connectivity.
With more… Continue Reading
Whose mob war is it, anyway?
An intellectual property court battle around popular mobster-themed Facebook game Mob Wars has been resolved. Coincidentally, real-life mobster Salvatore Riina has recently been gaining thousands of users on Facebook fan pages — and provoking protests in his home country of Italy.
Some mob wars, it seems, never end.
Riina’s life story helped inspire the seminal mobster book-turned-movie “The Godfather,” no doubt itself an inspiration for Mob Wars.
The Social Gaming Network, a leading developer of gaming applications on… Continue Reading
SGN’s iFun puts a bit more Wiimote in the iPhone
Gaming company SGN has a strategy that has worked so far with iPhone and iPod touch games: Use the device’s accelerometer to create simple sports games similar to one that have been made popular on the Nintendo Wii console thanks to the accelerometer in its Wiimote controller. It’s taking that approach to the next level with iFun, a new accelerometer-based gaming experience for the iPhone platform.
Basically, iFun allows you to use an iPhone or iPod… Continue Reading
Playfish raises $17 million for Facebook games
Playfish, a social gaming company that has four of the top ten games on Facebook, has raised $17 million in funding.
The deal shows that the intersection of games and social networking remains a hot sector in spite of the weakening economy.
Playfish came out of nowhere to become a leader in one of the hottest categories of the video game industry. It was founded in October, 2007, and launched its first game in December, 2007.
To date,… Continue Reading
SGN’s iPhone success is an important step toward social gaming unification
Social game maker Social Gaming Network (SGN) found out the easy way that there is something to gaming on the iPhone: It released two hugely successful games for the Apple device. But now it’s on to the next phases of its plan to further infiltrate iPhone gaming as it attempts to unify social gaming on a number of different platforms.
In less than a month since their release, SGN’s two iPhone games, iBowl and iGolf have… Continue Reading
Social Gaming Network acquires (fluff)Friends virtual pet game
Social Gaming Network has acquired (fluff)Friends, a Facebook virtual pet game maker. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Palo Alto, Calif.,-based SGN is in a race with Zynga to dominate Facebook games and it has been on an acquisition spree, buying small game developers who can land their applications on the top of the Facebook charts.
The (fluff)Friends game lets users adopt virtual pets, interact with their friends’ pets and compete to earn virtual currency. Users… Continue Reading
Mob Wars, the million-dollar-a-month independent Facebook app, may legally belong to SGN
Updated
When David Maestri launched Mob Wars in January of this year, he may have made a multi-million dollar mistake.
I have learned from a handful of sources that the entrepreneur, whose popular game is one of the most lucrative apps on Facebook, both developed and released Mob Wars while still employed at Freewebs, the company that later evolved into Social Gaming Network (SGN). By the time Maestri left the company around the middle of February, the… Continue Reading
Virtual goods starting to pan out for Facebook game app developers, and not just the venture-funded ones
Like grizzled miners panning for gold on a river high in the Sierras, Facebook applications developers have been toiling away, trying to figure out how to make money from the millions of people who use their apps every day. Those developers who focus on games are starting to find gold — by which I mean revenue gained from doing things like selling virtual goods in exchange for real money.
Various estimates given to me by developers… Continue Reading
Social game creator SGN gets funding from Amazon’s Bezos, who looks for more Web hits
Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, seems to have fallen for investing in hot new web properties. The latest one: Social Gaming Network (SGN), a top developer of gaming applications on Facebook and other social networks.
Bezos, who invests through a fund he has set up called Bezos Expeditions, also recently put money into messaging service Twitter, music slideshow creator Animoto, user-created game site Kongregate and location-based mobile application Whrrl (made by Pelago).
SGN… Continue Reading
SGN, on quest for social gaming revenue, raises $15 million
Social Gaming Network, or SGN, is one of the more promising companies exploiting Facebook’s platform. It builds “social games” — online games that use friend relationships and other social data from social networks to deliver more compelling games.
It’s promising because it wants to straddle the lucrative world of video games and the not-yet-lucrative world of social networks. It is one of many companies with ideas for how to turn social gaming, sometimes called “funware,” into… Continue Reading