$1.7 billion invested into Online Games and Related Entertainment in years 2007-2008

NB: Jussi and I have pooled our data, but will be looking at different aspects of it going forwards. Should be interesting…

Background

Roughly a month ago Jussi Laakkonen published a list of $350 million invested in year 2008 into virtual worlds, casual MMOs, and casual & social games. Based on US-centric sites, it missed out the majority of European deals. So, inspired by Jussi’s excellent idea, I then posted my own list of European deals I’d been tracking (which also included some extra things on the fringes of Jussi’s initial set). We decided that the right thing to do would be to put those lists together.

The extra things I’d been tracking were mainly in MMO investments, technology vendors, and support services (e.g. payment providers). I also wanted to add in mobile gaming (especially in light of what’s happening with the iPhone, the iPhone investment fund, and the Blackberry investment fund). These are the areas I’ll be looking into more in the future.

Analysis on T=Machine

I’ll be doing some followup posts over the next couple of days, Jussi’s zooming ahead with his – check out his blog to keep up with his comments too.

Followup posts will all be tagged under “jussi vc deals europe”

Jussi’s Analysis

Jussi’s posted a great summary of the core data.

The data

The data on VC investments has been collected from publicly available sources including but not limited to

* VentureBeat
* PaidContent
* Virtual World’s Management
* Avista Partners’ video game briefing
* TechCrunch
* CrunchBase

The data was gathered by Jussi Laakkonen and Adam Martin. The data is most accurate for year 2008. Year 2006 and earlier years have been only covered sporadically and typically only for companies that have received follow-up funding in years 2007-2008 (IIRC the European data is complete from the end of 2005 onwards, as it started from around the time of Mind Candy’s first announced funding). The data is provided AS IS and the authors make no warranties or guarantees about its accuracy.

Download the spreadsheet:

* Excel format
* CSV format
* HTML format