Following up on Ngmoco’s announcement not only of a new round of funding, but also their acquisition of Freeverse, CEO Neil Young says that both companies will continue to operate as usual, with Freeverse’s current games will remain just as they are.
“At this time, we don’t plan to take games that are already in the market and make them free. We’re not going to start charging people for balls on Skee-Ball or anything like that,” Young explains.
However, any games that Freeverse currently has in development will see some changes. Some of these titles will now be converted to reflect Ngmoco’s adoption of the free-to-play model, but others will retain the pay model, thus diversifying Ngmoco’s portfolio of offerings.
“There are games in Freeverse’s pipeline that will do very well as free-to-play games so we’ll have to do a little bit of work to adapt them,” Young says.
“There are some that won’t. For example Warp Gate will be a premium paid game. In terms of new games, we want to build as many of those as possible under the free-to-play model.”
Young also says that Ngmoco is still on the hunt for future acquisitions.
“We will continue to look for acquisitions that make sense at a studio or company level and acquisitions of applications.”
When asked by pocketgamer what Ngmoco’s smartphone plans are, Young can only comment, “The iPhone is in a strong leadership position. I’d say that among the pack of competitors, Android is the furthest advanced but it remains significantly behind the iPhone and iPod touch in terms of user adoption, ease of use, purchasing mechanisms, tools etc. I am encouraged at the rate at which Android is evolving, innovating and growing but for us the real focus is the iPhone OS.”
The funding round closed at the end of 2009 and was lead by Institutional Venture Partners. As is customary, IVP general partner Sandy Miller will now take a seat on Ngmoco’s board of directors. Previous investors Kleiner Perkins, Norwest Venture Partners, and Maples Investments also took part in this round of funding, raising Ngmoco’s total investments to $40.6 million. Not bad for a 1.5 year old startup.
But what does the iPad mean for games developers? An entirely new playing field. A number of games houses reacted almost immediately to the announcement, with the overwhelming consensus positive and indicating that they’re already hard at work on iPad ready apps.
Lasting just under a month, the public nomination process saw 26,899 opinions, and listed 3,639 different apps. BestAppEver breaks apps down into 56 unique award categories. Along with public opinions, 148Apps also brought in a team of industry people and iPhone application developers to help narrow down the nomination process.
