14 DAY TRIAL // Social networks may not be doing so well financially, with MySpace dragging down parent company News Corp Q2's earnings and Facebook's revenue growing at a rather slow pace, but some social apps designed to run inside them are doing much better. Berlin-based Wooga, a social gaming company founded this year, has closed a round of venture capital-backed investment from Holtzbrinck Ventures, after having great success with their first title, but the actual sum wasn't disclosed.
“Holtzbrinck Ventures is one of the most reputable venture capital firms for Internet ventures. They have a lot of experience in social networks, for example as an investor in StudiVZ, Germany’s largest social network. Therefore they are the ideal partner for further growing our company,” Jens Begemann, founder and managing director of wooga, said.
“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,” Dr. Lars Langusch, a partner at the Holtzbrinck Ventures investment firm, added in the usual exchange of niceties.
Wooga is known for Brain Buddies, a game that, as usual in the nascent world of social gaming, borrows from a previous title that has been very popular on Facebook, namely “Who Has the Biggest Brain?” created by Playfish, one of the biggest Facebook app developers. Still, the game has proven very successful, reaching 2.5 million users a little over a month after it was launched, and is still growing at an average rate of 100,000 users per day.
It remains to be seen whether future products will be original or just “reinterpretations” of other popular apps, though companies like Zynga, the biggest developer on Facebook in terms of popularity, building their success mostly by creating better versions of already available games don't make a strong case for originality.
Holtzbrinck Ventures, a German investment corporation, has funded over 60 companies in the tech sector, with a special interest in social media. It is, in fact, an investor in StudiVZ, a German Facebook clone, which is the largest home-grown social network in the country.