The mobile space is ripe for independent game developers to make their mark, but most indies lack the funds and the marketing expertise to ever make it big, except by sheer chance. MocoSpace—a top online destination for the mobile internet,—launched something about a month ago called the HTML5 Mobile Game Developer Fund, for the purpose of giving indie developers the funds and marketing support for their creations.
Today, the company announced the first three companies to be selected for the fund. They are New Game Town, Joyplay, and Kooky Panda. The three companies will be receiving a million dollar investment from MocoSpace to develop their games on the MocoSpace Games Platform.
New Game Town (NGT) is a mobile social entertainment company dedicated to creating and publishing engaging social games. Jeremy Wang, CTO of New Game Town, said that NGT was “ecstatic” to be one of the first recipients from the fund: "The MocoSpace Game Developer Fund enabled New Game Town to accelerate our development of HTML5 mobile games and launch at least six months earlier than we had planned." The funds were used to convert their game Happy Farm to HTML5. Happy Farm is launching on MocoSpace this week, and NGT is working on two other games, which they plan to launch on MocoSpace in the near future.
Joyplay’s goal is “to provide free online games such as online board games, card games & poker games.” Mobile games include casino games like poker, roulette, jacks and slots. With the funding from MocoSpace, Joyplay’s CEO James Adams has stated, “We were able to polish off our first HTML5 games and then publish them to MocoSpace’s established user base, with the seamless monetization of MocoGold, the virtual currency used on the site.” Adams says that their plans for the future include a spin on location and gaming: “We’ve got some really interesting location-based games in development that we’re going to bring to market.”
Kooky Panda Ltd. is a Beijing-based mobile social game development company which has been solely focused on browser-based mobile social games since early 2009. With partnerships globally, the Kooky Panda team is focused on creating world-class WAP, HTML5 and Flash Lite mobile social games, and have already created nearly 300 Flash Lite titles. CEO & Co-founder Cherry Wu described their reaction to receiving development funds from MocoSpace: "Kooky Panda firmly believes in mobile browser-based gaming and we've put all our chips on HTML5, so we were pumped to get some funding from MocoSpace to help turbo-charge Kooky Panda's growth in that direction." Kooky Panda has expanded their team in China to create HTML5 social browser games. Wu continues, “Our first game is a compelling fantasy game called The Lost World and we have a half-dozen other HTML5 games in the pipeline."
MocoSpace believes that there's a future in mobile game development on HTML5, and we're certainly keen on seeing what else they come up with.
Developers and publishers interested in participating in the HTML5 Mobile Game Developer Fund can reach out to MocoSpace at [email protected].
