Games search engine Wazap is coming to America.
The German company isn’t entering a market dominated by the News Corp owned IGN, Yahoo and Google without backing. Funding of $11.9 million in rounds led by Wellington Partners and Partech International sees Wazap well cashed up in its quest to conquer the American market.
Wazap indexes 84,000 different sources for gaming information. A small percentage of the indexed data is displayed by Wazap based on quality, user recommendations and publisher submissions.
Even without the benefit of a large English speaking user base during testing, the game indexing and reviews are extensive. Wazap does share similar features to other gaming review sites. Magazine reviews are scored, screenshots and cheats are available. The defining feature is in the delivery. Wazap doesn’t bury user generated game reviews and data through pages and pages of long winded reviews. Wazap sticks to its core as a games search engine by providing multiple sources of data in an accessible form. User reviews lead results with external information following down the page.
In April Wazap saw traffic of 16 million unique users on 250 million page views. The Alexa data for Wazap gives the site a ranking 1435 worldwide with Wazap being the 144th most popular site in Japan and 612th in Germany.
These are remarkable numbers, a sign that as a gaming destination Wazap is likely to find success in the largest gaming market of them all, the United States.
The English language version of Wazap launches in June.
Congrats to Christophe and the team!
It’s a pretty cool system, but it probably going to catch some competition from sites like GameFAQs. It does have a pretty click interface though, and well definitely be worth giving a look.
I don’t see any point here why this startup should gain much traction in the US. Competition is well established and offers on-par service. wazap generates 80% of their traffic in Japan where they are successfull, however they failed to get significant traction in other countries.
I bet 10$ on wazap being in the deadpool at the end of the month
Hi, Wazap is a good vertical search engine. However I would to bring to your attention that GameSkoot (www.gameskoot.com) recently launched in the US. GameSkoot’s beta is already avalaible in english and in french. We welcome your feedback
i checked it out and have to say overall impression is pretty good – i’m just a casual gamer (as i guess most of their target audience is) but i’m already kind of hooked. i hope the manage to streamline a few functionalities, then it should definitely make its mark over here as it did in europe and japan apparently
Those founders are hard-working folks. This whole project’s been in the making for so long that I think they have a good chance to succeed!