With an additional $25 million in funding recently secured, it was revealed mere moments ago that ngmoco acquired Freeverse, the developer/publisher responsible for many different games that have wound up in the top iTunes charts including Skee-Ball, Flick Fishing, and others. Freeverse was originally founded as a Mac shareware company in 1994 but has made a very successful transition to iPhone game development. This new round of funding brings ngmoco’s outside investment total to $40.6 million, a staggering amount of money for an iPhone game startup to be fueled by.
With the previous acquisition of Miraphonic, creators of Epic Pet Wars and other Epic Wars games, ngmoco has set their sights on the “freemium" market and have already seen two major successes in both TouchPets and Eliminate. Both games have been installed 9 million times and are played by hundreds of thousands of people every day.
Ngmoco plans on moving Freeverse’s games to a similar free-to-play model, then make money off various in-app purchases much like ngmoco’s upcoming games We Rule and GodFinger. They plan on releasing around 20 new games this year, and expect Freeverse to produce just as many.
We have an interview scheduled with Freeverse VP Colin Smith first thing tomorrow morning, and plan on getting to the bottom of what (if any) major changes we will see from Freeverse aside from switching to the new payment model. Freeverse was responsible for recent iPhone games Parachute Ninja, Zombie Cannon Carnage, and NBA Hotshot.
[via Tech Crunch]
