VentureBeat » UberStrike

Unity Technologies forms alliance to create better games on Facebook

Dean Takahashi — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:17:06 +0000

Unity Technologies is teaming up with everybody these days. Today, the San Francisco-based game development engine maker is partnering with Facebook to enable developers to create better games on the social network.

The deal will enable Facebook to hang on to its gamers by giving them a better overall visual experience with games based on Unity 3D, a cross-platform game engine. Facebook has historically been good for two-dimensional casual games, but it hasn’t been great at displaying 3D ones. Some specialty titles do work well on Facebook, but the goal with the Unity alliance is to make it much easier to create better hardcore games using the Unity Web Player.

David Helgason (pictured), the chief executive of Unity Technologies, told GamesBeat that both companies are working on features that allow players to engage in social functions such as sharing without popping out of the gaming experience in a Unity-based game. Normally, when that happens, the game issues a pop-up screen created by Facebook. On top of that, Unity-based titles will deliver a better installation process for players on Facebook.

It will be easier for developers to make cross-platform games that include Facebook. For instance, if a developer creates a Unity-based game, it will run easily on the web, Android, and iOS. Now it will also run easily on Facebook.

The alliance with Facebook is the third major deal in a week for Unity. The company has also announced partnerships with Sony for getting Unity games on the PlayStation 4 and a support partnership with Qualcomm for its Snapdragon processors.

“We are moving from strength to strength,” Helgason said. “Everybody wants to work with us.”

The reason this is happening is that every platform owner sees that the big hits are coming from developers on small teams, Helgason said. Hits like Supercell’s Clash of Clans (the top-grossing game on iOS) are paying off big, and platform owners want to be positioned to get those hits. Since Unity is used by so many small developers, the alliances make sense.

Unity has more than 200 million installations for its Unity Web Player, which can display games with cool 3D graphics. It is building a new social-network applications programming interface in the player to enable full-screen and full canvas experiences on Facebook. So far, 75 million active Facebook users have installed the Unity Web Player by playing games.

Some of the biggest Unity-based games on Facebook include Offensive Combat, Robot Rising, Wizard of Oz, Uberstrike, Kings Bounty, and I Am Playr. The new integrations will help make these existing titles better.

Helgason showed a demo for beautiful sci-fi racer The Chase that showed that Unity games are marching upward in quality. It has a large environment, atmospheric effects, and other cool 3D graphics features. A few years ago, Unity-based games on social and mobile platforms were unimpressive when it came to graphics. Now it is getting hard to tell them apart from triple-A console titles, Helgason said.

“Our customers are doing very impressive work,” Helgason said. “The mobile devices are becoming ridiculously powerful. I haven’t seen game that are more advanced than Unity on mobile. It has taken awhile as we have been doing this for 10 years.”

Unity has more than 250 employees, about half of them engineers.

“The Unity Web Player is an incredible browser-based platform for core games,” said Sean Ryan, the director of games partnerships at Facebook, in a statement. “People on Facebook are looking for the type of immersive games that have traditionally existed on consoles and desktop PCs. This collaboration will drive discovery of the Unity Web Player for Facebook users, make it easier for Unity games to integrate with Facebook, improve the full-screen experience on our games platform, and make it easier for these developers to build cross-platform games across desktop and mobile.”

At Facebook’s briefing at the GDC, Ryan said that core and mid-core games are priorities for Facebook, which believes in both the mobile and desktop markets for games as a service. He said Facebook’s share of the worldwide games-as-a-service market is $3 billion out of a total of $15 billion. Most of the rest of the market is hardcore and mid-core games, and Unity could help Facebook capture more of that share, Ryan said.

Unity has 1.5 million game developers using its tools. Rivals include Epic Games and Crytek on the high end and Game Salad, Corona, and others on the low end on mobile.

Filed under: Dev, Games

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Cmune raises funding for first-person shooters on mobile and Facebook

Dean Takahashi — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 22:25:45 +0000

Cmune has raised a round of funding today to publish more games like its Uberstrike first-person shooter on digital platforms like Facebook.

The Beijing-based company believes that social shooting games will overtake game consoles. That may seem silly right now, with games like Call of Duty: Black Ops II generating more than a billion dollars in revenue in a matter of weeks after launch. But Cmune, which has 10 million registered users and 1.2 million friends on Facebook, is looking ahead.

DCM provided the funding, but it did not disclose the amount of the investment.

Games such as UberStrike are pushing graphics on web-based social platforms and mobile devices forward, and Cmune hopes that there will eventually be a billion-dollar first-person shooter game market on the new platforms. The advantage that Cmune has is that its games are free-to-play, requiring no upfront investment from the gamer in playing a hardcore game on Facebook or other platforms.

Cmune recently announced that it was spreading beyond Facebook to GameStop’s Kongregate and is developing versions for iOS, Android, and other mobile devices. It previously announced it had raised money from Atomico, the international venture capital firm founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström.

Cmune makes free-to-play 3D shooter games such as UberStrike (pictured), which is the largest first-person shooter game on Facebook. It is also available on UberStrike.com and the Mac App Store. Cmune now has 1 million downloads on the Mac.

Cmune now has 20 employees, and it has tapped fans to generate new maps and concept art for UberStrike. Cmune was founded in 2007 in Seoul, but most of its team is now in Beijing.

Rivals include Kabam, Kixeye, SuperCell, Zynga, DeNA-Ngmoco, UbiSoft, EA, and Activision Blizzard.

Filed under: Business, Deals, Games, Mobile, Social

The Facebook game platform: Expanding into mobile, the Middle East, and all game categories (interview)

Dean Takahashi — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:30:07 +0000

Sean Ryan joined Facebook in January, 2011, in order to make sure that the social network understood the games and game publishers that were making Facebook into one of the world’s largest gaming platforms. He is the director of game partnerships at Facebook and has to communicate Facebook’s platform strategy for game companies and tell the broader story about one of Facebook’s most successful application categories. About 235 million of Facebook’s members have played a game in the past month, about 30 million more than a year ago. Mobile gaming has become one of the fastest-growing sectors of the business and Facebook is making it easier for mobile games to get discovered within its mobile app and on Facebook itself.

Here’s part one of our edited interview with Ryan. Part two runs tomorrow.

GamesBeat: What’s interesting to me about you guys is that you have so much data that you can know everything, right? What do you know about these 235 million players? When you look at all this data, what do you conclude?

Sean Ryan: A key theme is diversity. Diversity in genres of games, where we used to have only one or two genres. Now we have hidden-object games, core games, arcade games, and casual games.

Second is regions. If you look in the Middle East right now, the top game there is this Chinese-made,Turkish-published game called Happy Farm, which is just killing it in the Middle East. We didn’t see that a year or two ago. We saw mostly U.S. developers with non-localized games. This year we’ve seen a rise, particularly in Europe, but around the world, of local or regional developers. Even the U.S. developers have, in many cases, localized their games into 12 or 14 languages.

And then finally platforms. We’ve gone from a desktop-only product to having a mobile platform product. The majority of the top apps and games in the iOS and Google Play stores are using our platform. That’s the general theme we look at from last year. We’ll continue to see that going forward as we try to make sure we have a range of games for a range of players from around the world.

GamesBeat: How do you look back on Facebook gaming history? It seems like the Vampires and the Zombies games are pretty far behind us?

Ryan: Yeah. We were talking about that in the last couple of days. As we see the rise of 3D games on the desktop, whether it’s Unity or Flash 11… I’ve only been here a little less than two years. But if you look back at four years ago, the games that won Social Game of the Year were almost simple word-based games. The vampires or the mobsters or the Big Brain games. Now I look at FarmVille 2 or Jet Set Secret. They’re pretty rich games. There are bigger storylines, better music, deeper gameplay. They’re becoming full-fledged games in a way that I think is compelling. And they’re a much more diverse set of games. I think that’s the greater theme over the last four years.

GamesBeat: I just spoke recently to Blake Commagere about his new startup. He was saying it was interesting how much things have changed, but also how little some other things have changed. Virtual goods are still such a gigantic part of monetizing games on Facebook. He wants to develop new business models, like product placement, which is what he’s doing now.

Ryan: We launched subscriptions a few months ago. That’s being gradually adopted by a set of our partners. But what we’ve found, if you look around the world at both the desktop business and now the mobile business, is that virtual goods or some type of freemium model tend to be the most efficient way to drive revenue from users.

I used to run a music subscription service called Rhapsody. It was about $15 dollars a month. What we would see in those days was that about a third of our users never used it, so they were going to cancel. About a third of our users appeared to run it 24 hours a day. And then a third of our users used it intermittently.

The advantage of virtual goods, versus subscription, is that it tends to match how interested you are in the game and how much you’re willing to either spend time or spend money. That’s often a better match. If I’m going to want to play the game for an hour or two a week, I never have to spend any money. On the other hand, if I really want to get into it, with something like Kixeye’s War Commander games, where you have some really hardcore users…. They end up spending more money than a subscription or a package product might cost.

But I agree with Blake in that I don’t think it’s the only revenue model in the world. Along that diversity theme that I keep going back to, I would say subscriptions are a valid model for a section of games, like chess. You don’t really want to make chess into a virtual goods game. It’s not the way the game is built. They can have advertising-supported models or a la carte paid models or subscription models. Product placement will be interesting. We haven’t seen enough revenue generated from that model yet, but Blake’s a talented guy. I think we’ll continue to see people looking at different types of revenue models for different types of users and different types of games.

That’s what I keep going back to. It’s not just one type of game or one type of revenue model. What we’ve seen in Asia and other parts of the world is that when you build a game correctly around a freemium business model, it can be quite a profitable enterprise. We see that in mobile. When you look at the top 25 grossing games on iOS, in general, the majority of them now are freemium games. That wasn’t true a year ago. And luckily the majority of them, if they’re social games, are using Facebook as their primary login. That’s working well for us.

GamesBeat: What is your job like these days? What are you talking to game companies about when it comes to games on Facebook?

Ryan: [laughing] Depends on the week sometimes. We’ve expanded my team and our investment in gaming overall in the last year. A lot of it’s about hiring, or it has been for the last six months. That’s on a global basis, as we spread around the world making sure we have the right set of developers for different regions, like Asia-Pacific and Europe and now the Middle East and Latin America. Most of what we do is work with a wide set of partners to explain to them what’s coming down the pipe from the platform. We get their feedback on how we can improve the platform, as we look at our product development roadmap for the next six months. That could be things like, “Hey, we’d really like it if you added these payment systems in Saudi Arabia.” It could be, “Hey, it’d be nice if you had new types of stories that showed up in the feed that we’ve started to deploy….” Those are the types of feedback we get from developers about how we can be a better game platform.

Certainly the last 12 months have been all about, “What can you do for us on mobile?” That’s why deploying the mobile platform has been such a large focus for us. In addition, we try to do a better job of explaining to them what is still a pretty fast-moving platform. “These are the next set of improvements coming. Here’s how you can take advantage of them.”

GamesBeat: I don’t know if you had to spend much time on…convincing them that Zynga was not the only company that could be successful on Facebook? And then convincing them that Facebook Credits were a good idea. Was there a period of time where that was a big part of your job?

Ryan: Whenever we make policy changes, part of my team’s goal is to make sure that we explain that to developers and tell them how it’ll affect their business. We want to help them through that. Every day we compete in the world of platform and how our developers allocate resources. We spend a lot of time explaining to them how they can make better games. Not so much on the level of the game itself, but how they can integrate better with us, so that they can have a more successful experience.

We spend a lot of time with, for example, Song Pop, which is a wonderful game. They use our social channels, both on desktop and mobile, better than almost anybody. They’ve been wonderful to work with. They’re incredibly responsive, as are a lot of developers. So the question is, where should you be spending your resources in games? If you want to be mobile only, we absolutely support that. Here’s how to use our mobile platform, especially now that we’ve announced the integration with iOS 6 and our new SDK, which is quite powerful. Here’s why you should adopt that. Here are the benefits. If you want to be on Canvas, just Canvas to desktop, here’s the benefits of that business. Especially with the rise of App Center, which is increasingly how people find games on Facebook.

It’s not just about how many messages you send into the channel. We can help your game be discovered. That’s what we are, a discovery engine. We’re a discovery and distribution engine for both desktop and mobile. So we spend a fair amount of time on that. The best way to be featured in App Center, the best way to make sure you’re using our channels correctly.

GamesBeat: What do you think of the trends in the genres right now?

Ryan: When I came here, that was the one thing I really wanted. I wanted to see a greater diversity of games. The hidden-object games alone, there were probably 10 or 20 by the end of the year. That’s a category that didn’t exist a year before [on social]. I didn’t foresee the rise of arcade and casual. The Bubble Shooters, the Candy Crushes, that type of lighter-weight game. The developers are coming up with great ways to monetize it: power-ups and bonuses.

We certainly spent a fair amount of time on the rise of casino, which is a natural for us. It’s a very social genre. The next six to 12 months, it’s about core and mid-core. Not because the other genres aren’t good, but when we look at openings on the platform where we think we can deliver a powerful experience alongside our developers…. As we start to see Unity and Flash 11 become more prevalent, we can have a really rich gaming experience.

GamesBeat: Can you explain both of those a bit more? Flash 11.4 is something that will enable new kinds of games.

Ryan: Sure. Flash 11 introduces 3D. So does Unity. Both of those enable the software to tap the graphics processing unit, which means you can get far richer graphics in a web-based game than you could before. FarmVille 2 is a great example. It has 3D effects that you wouldn’t see before. You look at Robot Rising from Tencent, which is a great new game, a MechWarrior-style blow-things-up game.

It’s not just about graphics, though. It’s about storyline. It’s about sound. People forget about sound sometimes. But that’s what we’re seeing now with the success of Kixeye, the success of Plarium in Israel, and some of these smaller studios like Eruptive Games. They’re a small studio out of Vancouver. If you haven’t played Citizen Grim, it is a wonderful game. It’s a zombie shoot-’em-up. You just run around and kill everything, and it is so much fun. That’s where we’re going to see the next wave of richer games. Previously, you could only get those through a large download. Now you can get them in a web-based experience.

You’re seeing this in China already. China is moving away from the very thick client, a two-gig client, to a lighter-weight, thinner client, meaning a web-based game. We’re seeing that here in Facebook as well.

GamesBeat: What do you think is going to happen between 2D games and 3D games? On iOS now, they have pretty good 3D graphics capability, but it still seems like 2D games are the vast majority.

Ryan: Yeah. I went through this debate many other times at many other companies. I remember this on the console. 2D games can be great experiences, like Bejeweled Blitz or Song Pop. These aren’t necessarily better as a 3D game. But that being said, user expectations tend to go up over time as far as the quality of experience they’re looking for. What we’ll see in 3D, which will enable to rise of new games on Facebook — the role-playing games, the MMOs, the realtime strategy games like War Commander and others…. You get a richer experience. It’s suited to those types of games.

2D games are simpler to build, and in many cases appeal to a wide set of users. So it’s not an either-or. It’s not “everything goes to 3D” at all. But until very recently, on Facebook we’ve mostly had 2D games, or 2.5D games with an isometric 2D view. What we’re seeing now is the addition of 3D games. Those can be more expensive to make, because the graphics are richer and the overall experience can be richer, but they provide a more immersive experience. I think you’re going to see some great first-person shooters. If you haven’t seen UberStrike, which was recently revamped and relaunched…. You will see great first-person shooters on desktop Facebook that we didn’t see a year or two years ago.

Look for part two of our interview with Ryan on Saturday morning.

Filed under: Games, Mobile, Social

GamesBeat Weekly Roundup

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:48:39 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best games stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week Minecraft on 360 broke all digital-sales records on its first day, controversial marketing specialist Paul Christoforo filed a lawsuit against N-Control, Activision Blizzard touted Skylanders as bigger than Angry Birds, and Take-Two delayed BioShock Infinite.

You’ll also find reviews for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, Toy Soliders, Lone Survivor, and Awesomenauts.

Cmune spreads UberStrike to new platforms and raises funds from Skype founder

Dean Takahashi — Fri, 11 May 2012 06:30:39 +0000

Cmune, the maker hardcore 3D social games, has had a big couple of days. It announced that it was spreading beyond Facebook to GameStop’s Kongregate and is developing versions for iOS, Android, and other mobile devices. And now it has just announced that it has raised money from Atomico, the international venture capital firm founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström.

The Beijing-based company made the announcement at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. Cmune makes free-to-play 3D shooter games such as UberStrike (pictured), which has more than 5 million registered players. It has 1 million monthly active users, making it the largest first-person shooter game on Facebook. It is also available on UberStrike.com and the Mac App Store.

“We’re delighted to be investing in a China-based company that targets a global market”, said Kelly Poon, Atomico’s Lead in China. “Cmune’s innovation in bringing 3D games to social platforms is remarkable, and it is already leading the way with UberStrike in the popular first-person shooter genre. The company has done a brilliant job at overcoming both technical and design challenges to bring console-quality games to the web.”

Atomico has investments in 50 companies, including Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds.

“Niklas is one of the few modern tech entrepreneurs who has built a global company with success in both the East and West. Having co-founded Skype and previously made major investments in pioneering gaming companies such as Rovio, he understands freemium as a business model.” said Ludovic Bodin, chief executive of Cmune.

At the conference, Cmune showed the browser-based UberStrike running cross-platform between Facebook, iOS, and Android mobile devices. UberStrike features sharp and fast 3D graphics.

The move to Kongregate will likely add more users, as Kongregate has more than 16 million monthly unique users.

Cmune now has 20 employees and it is hiring. Meanwhile, it has tapped fans to generate new maps and concept art for UberStrike. Cmune was founded in 2007 in Seoul, South Korea, but most of its team is now in Beijing.

Rivals include hardcore and mid-core game companies such as Kabam, Funzio, Nexon and Kixeye.

Filed under: Games