Engineer-A-Business

Reaching the Top 20 list of games for Facebook is an aspiration of more gaming developers than I could even count. The harsh truth is that for every game that makes it to this magical list, there are probably a thousand other games that are lucky to be considered mediocre in the gaming or Facebook communities. If there is a science to making it to the top, Wooga may have figured it out.

The firm introduced a game they titled “Brain Buddies”, which the Facebook community took immediate notice of. Users spent 25,000 hours playing Brain Buddies within the first week of its inception. Three months later, the game had five million active users. It is now translated in eight different languages and has fans in over two hundred countries.

The question many gamers are asking is whether Wooga will be launching another game down the road that will be as good as Brain Buddies. There is speculation that Brain Buddies is Wooga’s gateway to developing other successful applications in the future. Wooga has received financial backing from Holtzbrinck Ventures, who are optimistic about the company’s future. "We have been looking at the market for social games for some time and analyzed it deeply. Wooga's founding team convinced us and tipped the scale in the end," stated Lars Langusch, one of the partners at Holtzbrinck. Holtzbrinck has dealt with many startups and is selective about which ones it chooses to personally finance. The fact Holtzbrinck is supporting Wooga is a sign of the direction that Wooga is headed.

Wooga has been successful largely to its ability to analyze social trends just as much as developing a great product. The company recognized that online gaming and social networking were both growing markets and decided that if it developed a product that attempted to address both of these trends it would have a strong advantage over competitors. However, other gaming developers with more experience and stronger brand names tried to enter the same market without being nearly as successful. Wooga has proven that a startup company can enter the social network gaming market and still make it to the top.

Last Updated (10 August 2010)