Over $150M invested in Europe into social games, VWs, casual MMOs & games

Jussi posted an excellent writeup of how there’s been over $350 million invested in social games etc worldwide, and commented that he the European side wasn’t really included in his sources.

But I’ve been tracking the European side for a while, and since I’m preparing a new MMO / Education startup at the moment, I’ve recently been refreshing my data.

So, here it is: my version of Jussi’s post, but the EU-only version :)

The Deals

Venture capital funding for social games, virtual world, casual MMO and casual games

[Time span covered: Q4 2006 – Q3 2008 (present); see NOTES at bottom]

Notes: How this was compiled

This comes from my personal collation of companies related to online games, social worlds, support services (billing, outsourcing, mobile, etc) – which is an eclectic mix of things that I’ve tracked over the years relating to my own interests and plans. I only really started paying attention in 2005/2006 when I was at MindCandy. For this blog post, I re-checked every single company via Google before adding it above, and then cross-referenced against good sources such as Calibre-One’s quarterly deal reports to see if I’d made any stupid mistakes. There were discrepencies, some of which I’d clearly made a typo (which I corrected), and others that were only subtly different, so there’s probably some mistakes in the above.

Notes: Rate of investment in games companies is increasing

How it’s arranged here it’s maybe not so obvious, but when looking through my spreadsheets it’s more obvious that there 2005-mid 2007 wasn’t a great time for these investments (especially in monetary value), but late 2007-mid 2008 has been a lot better.

Maybe that’s the effect of the Global Philip Rosedale Reality-Distortion Field? (aka “Second Life convincing people that Virtual Worlds are viable, commericalisable, and investable”) :).

Notes: German Companies really don’t like talking about money

I tried – really hard – to get info for the companies who didn’t announce how much investment they’d taken on when they announced they’d received it, but in most cases I failed.

I noticed that most countries privately owned companies are quite open about how much money they’ve raised (American ones especially), and quiet about how much they’re making. The Germans are strangely quiet, generally, on both. I believe that means that people:

• talk less about German companies
• know fewer German service providers
• consider fewer tactical partnerships with German companies

Maybe I only notice this because I’m English, and business people in the UK have long obsessed about how our inability to be brash in business (as a nation) has hampered us compared to the Americans. IMHO this silence is an ill-advised strategy, but them I’m a huge fan of transparency in all aspects of business :).