Holtzbrinck Ventures invests in social games start-up wooga
- First game „Brain Buddies“ reaches 2.5 million users on Facebook within 5 weeks after launch
- New games in the pipeline
- Online games industry proofs to be crisis resistant
Berlin, August 7th 2009 – Berlin-based social gaming start-up wooga, founded in January 2009, has won Holtzbrinck Ventures as an investor to finance further growth. Just 5 weeks after its launch, wooga’s first game “Brain Buddies” reached 2.5 million users on Facebook and continues to grow at 100,000 users per day. Players from over 200 countries have already spent 100 million minutes of play time with the Facebook hit. wooga thereby shows that venture funding is still possible in crisis resistant industries like online games.
The brain training game that was launched on July 1st is the first game of the international game development company wooga from Berlin. Currently the team is already working on completely new games that the company will publish in the next few months, building on the momentum of Brain Buddies.
Dr. Lars Langusch, partner at Holtzbrinck Ventures: “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.”
Facebook Game “Brain Buddies”: 1 Million Users in Three Weeks
- 100,000 new users per day
- 30 million minutes played already
- Most international Facebook Game with users from 208 countries
- Four new mini games in the works
Berlin, 24. July 2009 - ”Brain Buddies”, the game that has become the new favorite of Facebook users, achieved the mark of one million users in the record time of only three weeks of being online. Louise S. from Miami, USA is the one millionth user.
There seems to be no end to Brain Buddie’s growth: The game already belongs to the Top 40 games on Facebook – out of a total of 10,000 games – adding 100,000 users daily. Overall the brain training game has reached 30 million minutes of play time already. The availability of Brain Buddies in eight languages plays out to its advantage: It has attracted users from 208 countries, among them Albania, Rwanda, and Vanuatu, an island in the South Pacific.
