Mobile games hot sector for venture capital

” The 7th annual Mobile Games Forum was held in London on January 19th and 20th. Paul Flanagan, Executive in Residence, Ariadne Capital was invited to speak on a VC panel and relays his thoughts on the event.

The first thing that caught my attention is that our US cousins are more active on the mobile web than Europeans. How could this be – I thought we were light years ahead?. Wrong. Alistair Hill, Lead Analyst of comScore Inc pointed out that the US carriers offer more unlimited data plans than European operators.

Mobile games are a big business, recently more dominated by big players such as EA Games and Gameloft than smaller studios or start-ups. For example, video game publisher Gameloft announced consolidated sales of €122m for 2009, up 11% compared to 2008. Years ago much of the coding and development moved offshore and UK game developers focused up-market on console titles.

(…) The VCs at the event expressed a keen desire to talk to companies in the mobile space. Venture backed companies liked Aurora Feint and Scoreloop were sponsors of the event, both providing social platforms replicating the success stories of games portals on the Internet.” by Paul Flanagan, Entrepreneurcountry

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