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Back in April, a developer of games, casual collective rebranded as Kixeye and launched a new real-time strategy game, titled battle pirates. Since launch, it was hard work at improving some of the new capital to expand his team and implement additional headers. Officially it happened to pass this morning as the company announced that it has closed $ 18 million Series c round of financing, bringing the total investment to $ 23.5 million.
The new round led by Jafco Ventures, were from returning investors Trinity Ventures and enterprise partners. The increase, Jafco managing partner Joe Horowitz is the signing of the Council of its launch and will be merged into — big symbolic feather in the CAP for Kixeye — Zynga co-founder Andrew Trader, aka "a. t."
According to Kixeye CEO will Harbin run hit his achievement over the past 8 months, which has become profitable and positive cash flow. So when you add a trader's Board of Directors, Kixeye hopes to use Zynga's Executive Vice President of sales and business development experience (especially in the scale Zynga in the largest player in the social gaming) to help continue its recent growth.
With regard to the trader, he said that he saw Kixeye emerge as one of the leading innovators in social gaming space, especially for hardcore gamers. "Gamers want a big game, not re-skinned versions of the same," said a. t. "I am pleased to be part of this company and I look forward to helping them continue their successful trajectory." And speaking of skins and cloning, both things that Kixeye became extremely conscious, given that the launch last week accused funded competitor Kabam, copying its successful backyard monsters and skins for the beta launch Kabam in the Edgeworld.
As Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat, while charges skins have become commonplace in the rapidly growing (and competitive) social games space but Kixeye thought that "especially egregious" in this instance. "This is not only offensive to us," Harbin told VentureBeat. "It's very bad for this space. We are fighting an uphill battle to create hardcore games on Facebook. More clones for these games, the more they can sour cream consumers in the market ".
And that more charges of stealing (and hides), also known as Zynga (and hence, a.t.), who was accused of stealing source code for Farmville, for example.
Thus players social gaming, everyone is looking for ways to distinguish their brands and their names from the competition. In the case of Kixeye, Harbin said that the company plans to use some of its new funding to start a new, aggressive release cycle, which will include some new approaches to social games.
"Next year we will be releasing one major title for the quarter, since our future war Commander RTAS," said the Director. "We're also going to create games for Facebook, which nobody had seen before, including dynamic MMORPG, racing game and, hopefully, titles that really push the envelope". And Harbin has every reason to want to take these genres in Facebook, as racing, action, and the hidden objects are genres that have multiple names on Facebook at the moment.
And the company is growing at a rate that justifies his new quest: over the past 18 months, Kixeye has grown its group from 3 to 60, and passed with little presence on Facebook to more than 5 million monthly active users. Part of the reason that Kixeye was so firmly defending backyard monsters is that the game was really what put Kixeye on the map, as it is currently averaging more than 1 million active users per day.
So as a developer of games of San Francisco goes ahead with a WAD of cash in his pocket, you can probably expect run continue to focus on creating a Facebook titles for the hardcore gamer, trying to make a more interesting and challenging games, older and more mature audience. And I would expect that occurs after the top engineering talent will be part of these efforts.
More information on Kixeye check 'em out at home here.
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