Neil Young’s iPhone gaming startup, ngmoco, has received Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s iFund. The iFund was announced by Steve Jobs as a $100 million pool of venture capital funding available to select startup iPhone developers. This represents the first iPhone gaming company to be funded by the initiative.
Neil Young was a former EA executive who decided to start a new gaming company focused on the iPhone.
“The iPhone is the next great game platform and we see an incredible opportunity to build games worthy of the customers that use it," said Neil Young, CEO, ngmoco. “With Bing, Kleiner Perkins and Maples Investments, we have great partners who share our passion to create a new type of publisher and radically reshape the mobile games industry."
The amount of capital raised was not disclosed, but Venture Capital funding indicates that the firm believes that Young’s venture has significant financial potential.
Billy Frontier is now my 2nd favorite iPhone game, Enigmo is still number 1. One small bit of advice, change the settings so that you shoot where you touch, otherwise it can prove a tad frustrating.
I'm hoping for OttoMatic next, but heaven knows how they'll get the controls working!
Yeah, Enigmo is one of my all-time favs too, and I just downloaded BF so we'll see how that goes.
On a side note, it is refreshing to see developers NOT penalizing - instead, actually REWARDING! - early adopters. Thanks, Pangea!
@mavis: I totally agree. The arrival of the App Store is really an inflection point for many reasons - instant delivery, direct sales, great value, fast updates, special discounts... I truly hope that Pangea are making some serious money, they deserve it!
For me on my 2G iPhone this game (Billy Frontier) lags och quits unexpectedly all the time,
I've tried to shut off sound effects and that but still doesnt work. Worthless game until update
@Gustaf: that's really odd - I have no lag at all on my 3G or my Touch with sound enabled! Then again, I reboot several times a day. You might give it a shot. In any case, I suspect it's something to do with your phone specifically as I don't have any problems here with either of my devices.
@James: you're right - I hope Pangea is doing well too, their App Store contributions rock!
a reboot helped my problems...
thanks mavis,
sorry for the misleading critique,
@Gustaf and Mavis: You highlight a good point, I've had jerky frame rates from quite a number of games requiring a full restart, perhaps the September update to solve this problem.
@Gustaf: glad it helped. Actually, there's a reason why I reboot several times a day, if you don't mind a somewhat technical read:
http://discussions.apple.co...
Apple's rush to get 2.0 out by the July11th deadline unfortunately meant cut corners, sloppy coding, and ridiculous oversights (IMHO) ... Anyway, hopefully they'll get things figured out soon. In the meantime, keep rebooting!! ;)
Damn, first try with BF... its a pain to play! How can this game be your second best iPhone game??
Maybe im wrong and need to play more but for now its a pain. (not mention to the low fps even with reboot)
I'm impressed that the same game I played on my mac couple of years ago is now running on my freaking iPhone!
I like the game, it works really well on the touchscreen. But sometimes it's hard to point exactly where you want to shoot. A stylus would be ideal for this :)
And when the duel ends – when the camera pans around – the framerate drops drastically, and it doesn't look good. Rebooting didn't help the matter.
But overall a nice game. And only €2.39. Not a bad deal, not at all. I'm sure there will be bugfixes soon.
Billy Frontier is sweet i dig it! Now we need some GTA action soon, even old school top view style.