Seattle-based Z2Live, a new mobile social gaming platform, is announcing a second round of financing tomorrow – $3 million from Madrona Venture Group (also Seattle based), topping off the $1 million they raised from Madrona last year. Paul Goodrich from Madrona is on the company’s board of directors.
The company describes itself as “the first mobile multiplayer game platform,” and has created a multiplayer platform for the iPhone/iPod Touch products. They also offer a set of services to implement subscriptions. The platform, they say, supports a wide variety of social games, including: turn-based casual games, racing games, role-playing games, and eventually the most sophisticated first-person shooters. The platform is free, Z2Live takes a cut of revenues from the games.
The company has a complicated corporate structure. Z2Live is a division of Zero260, which launched another product this year called PhotoFeedd. The companies were founded by David Bluhm and Damon Danieli.
A YouTube video shows a sample game called Showdown:
It’s about time. I wonder how they’ll profit – subscription fees + poker = massacre.
Mobile cum Web social games will be a hit. Not mobile alone apps.
Like google voice, all other carriers like AT&T should give a web management tool hosted in internet, with phone no. as login.
People love their online poker.
2nd golden age of gaming has dawned.
This is pretty cool – the AI on most poker games suck so playing live poker online is the next best thing to live poker…
Impressive demo – the platform behind looks really powerful.
Social gaming has been hot for years – its going to take off on the iPhone. I’ve been pretty pleased with Bluetooth gaming in general. Its generally easy to connect and it brings the ’social’ aspect home – since you sit right across from the person. I think we will continue to see more and more of this soon, but the biggest hurdle is the fact that you need two copies of a game. For free titles this is fine, but I think developers are going to face the challenge of offloading multiple copies.
Showdown Poker is fairly basic but okay for a dollar. Unfortunately it’s limited to two players.
I was wondering why Apple waited a year to open up Bluetooth to app developers.
Apple Tablet?
This is another cool inventions to gadgets.
This seems to be so perfectly created, so much with this is so fun!…
This is such a nice post!
Mike, I certainly agree with the title, and I don’t typically comment on posts, but in what possible way can Z2Live be “first”? And I don’t mean Cellufun in particular, though we’ve been doing multiplayer mobile games since 2005 — Techcrunch has itself covered other platform providers, including other iPhone centric ones, not to mention multiple efforts in the field that predate 2005.
none of them offer an open platform for rich multiplayer interaction – the other ones are social platforms like open feint and plus. the difference is that this isn’t a closed garden framework, it’s open for any developer to use. that’s a very different model than content developers creating a proprietary system for their games.
Actually, the first TRUE multiplayer was released with mild fan fair in 2002 by a former company of mine. We allowed a J2ME slalom skiing game to be played in real time between a Sprint subscriber and a Cingular subscriber. It required both carriers providing us a dedicated sockets connection – which could never scale. Lots of “multiplayer” messaging out there (leaderboards, lobbies, social games) today but no-one offers a set of developer APIs to connect two devices across two different 3G or Wifi connections. To offer this at scale is non-trivial….
They are not the first, there are many platforms like this.
We have launched ours http://www.cotopia.com mobile multiplayer game platform in 2003.
the problm is, tis really hard to make there any real profit.
tomas
I think what makes this a “first” is the foray into racing and shooter games. Turn-based games have been out for awhile, but this is the first attempt at a platform that offers true “twitch” mobile gameplay over the Internet.
Hands-On Mobile has done this since 2005 with World Poker Tour Texas Hold ‘Em *yawn*
Moblyng has been doing mobile and web multiplayer games for months- Facebook, iPhone, Android and iPhone. Dungeon Quest, m:Mafia, m:Vampire and m:Poker Live. The games are very popular.
Moblyng also licenses its technology platform to partners and is a full development solution- not just the multi-player part, but a full cross-platform development solution.
This really is a very hot field. I’m a bit surprised that they have concentrated so heavily on the iPhone and don’t seem to be making much of a multi-platform play. I wonder if this “platform” is more like a set of API’s and Objectve C classes. This would certainly reduce portability.
The iPhone is certainly a wonderful platform, but with Android set to be released on a slew of new phones, it’s not the sort of boat you’d want to miss.
Other companies are working towards more portable platforms. Given, these are not aimed at fast-twitch games, they can still be used for most types of casual games (the kind that are really popular on facebook). Platforms that come to mind are rhomobile, phone gap, appcelerator and the above mentioned Moblyng.
Moblyng was even featured in venture beat for it’s comprehensive, cross-platform coverage. It appears to be similar to phone gap, but much more polished and complete. If I were a serious game developer, that’s the sort of thing I’d want to use, rather than an opensource toy.
The coming year should be really exciting as more and more people jump into the fray.
Impressive demo – looks like its gonna be a buster
They are not the first. Another example a quick search reveals is Exit Games’ Neutron platform and APIs are available and market proven since 2003, see http://www.exit...eferences/cases. Exit Games has APIs out for Android, iPhone, Brew, Flash, J2ME, Unity 3D, … and offers a realtime server, http://photon.exitgames.com/ as well.
Doesn’t seem to require lots of research or funded statements to raise financing in the US despite crisis … more bubbles, anyone?))