Israeli gaming company GameGround has closed a $4.1 million funding round from Sequoia Capital. The company had previously raised a $2 million seed round from a number of angel investors and founders.
For now, we don’t really know much about GameGround other than the team behind it. It was founded in 2007 by Shaul Olmert (formerly of MTV), Guy Margolin (formerly of 888.com, and Itzik Ben-Bassat. Ben-Bassat, who currently serves as Chairman, comes from highly regarded game development studio Blizzard, where he was VP of international and global business development and worked on integration with Internet services. While he wouldn’t get into specifics, he says that Gameground is looking to expand how far the Internet ties into computer games.
For now, the company isn’t actually making any games — it’s making a special agent for Mac and PC that can work with existing games to expand their online functionality, even after they’re released. At this point exactly what can be done with the agent is unclear, but I suspect it will allow gamers to distribute high scores and milestones to their social networks, and perhaps use your social graph to connect you with your friends in-game. Apparently these features will be integrated with the games in an “automatic way”, presumably with little, if any, work needed on the developer’s side.
Here’s how the company describes itself on the site:
For you, gaming is more than a mild diversion. It’s a way of life. And soon, life is going to get a whole lot more exciting. Introducing GameGround, an all-new personalized gaming center built around advanced technologies that aggregate all your web-wide gaming activities into a single online destination.
At the heart of GameGround is a powerful yet simple-to-use Personalized Command Center that gives you total control over every facet of your gaming experience. From this console, you’ll have the ability to tap into comprehensive, never-before-existing data for any game you play, no matter where on the web you play it, no matter who you play against. This is an unprecedented innovation that simply cannot be found anywhere else in the world of gaming!
this is the future,
However, how/when/what can be done is going to be very interesting.. but most importantly, what would be the business model, its totally un-chartered territory.
these are some of the main reasons why I already set the date and topic for next Gambit on ’social gaming’ on 16th July.
Hope to see some of you there in London!
Http://www.TheGambit.info
BR
@GarethWong
I realize we don’t have much detail yet, but this sounds like Valve’s Steamworks except for Flash games.
hmm i cant really see a difference to http://www.rupture.com or http://raptr.com for now
I am prety sure that someone is missing from the list of founders, I’d even go as far as saying the first and main founder.
Check me if you’ld like…
Well good luck to them, but I think they kind of missed the train.
There are companies doing the same from within the big publishers (EA, Valve, MTV), and companies that are better positioned to compete with either a much stronger team (e.g. raptr), or a sheer user base advantage (XFire).
Then again, we might not understand what it is that they are actually doing.