Founded 2009 | Headquarters Berlin, Germany Type of business Privately held company | |
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Industry Video games, Social Network Service, Mobile games, Game development, Casual games, Facebook games Key people Jens Begemann
Philipp Moeser CEO Jens Begemann (5 Jan 2009–) Video games Jelly Splash, Pearl's Peril, Futurama: Game of Drones Profiles | ||
Wooga tour
Wooga is a mobile-first game developer located in Berlin, Germany. The company develops free-to-play mobile and social games for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets and social networks like Facebook. It is the world's 5th biggest game developer (by monthly active users) on the Facebook platform as of March 2014.
Contents
Understanding the gaming industry with wooga coo jan miczaika
Company Structure
Wooga’s company structure is non-traditional. Game development is decentralized, and dealt with by autonomous teams working under separate studios within the company. Business functions, such as HR, PR, and marketing are dealt with centrally.
History
Wooga was founded in January 2009 by Jens Begemann (CEO), Patrick Paulisch (Co-founder) and Philipp Moeser (CTO). Patrick Paulisch has since left Wooga.
In July 2009, Wooga launched its first game, Brain Buddies. The game reached 5 million monthly players 3 months after launch. The company received €5 million in a round of funding led by Balderton Capital in November 2009. Holtzbrinck Ventures, which had provided funding earlier that year, also participated in this round.
In February 2010, Wooga launched its second game, Bubble Island, which reached 4 million monthly players in 8 weeks. In May 2010, Wooga launched its third game, Monster World Wooga announced in July 2016 that Monster World would be shut down on August 31st after 6 years due to a decline in the number of players. In November 2010, Wooga launched Happy Hospital. In March 2011, Wooga launched Diamond Dash, released in December for iPhone and iPad on the iOS App Store. In March 2012, Wooga announced that Diamond Dash had been downloaded over 11 million times since launch. Wooga raised a Series B Round of $24 m funding in May 2011.
Magic Land Island was launched during the GDC Europe in August 2011 in Cologne. In June 2012 the HTML5 game was open sourced under the name Pocket Island on GitHub under MIT license and with the assets under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA.
In March 2013 Wooga launched both Monster World mobile for iOS and Pearl’s Peril. Pearl’s Peril became the company’s fastest selling game. In April 2013 Wooga launched Pocket Village, in May Fantastic Forest and Kingsbridge. In February 2014 Fantastic Forest was relaunched as Farm Tales.
In August 2013 Jelly Splash launched on iOS. The game was subsequently released on the Facebook.com platform in September 2013, and on Android in October 2013. Wooga also launched Jelly Splash as a test title for the Korean KakaoTalk platform in November 2013. In December 2013, Jelly Splash reported Monthly Active Users of 8.2 million.
At GDC 2014, CEO Jens Begemann presented the company’s new development approach, which he calls the “hit filter”. The focus of this new approach is to create two hits per year.
In May 2015, Wooga launched Crazy Kings (developed by TicBits).
Reception and Impact
According to Metrics Monk, in February 2014 Wooga has a total of approx. 35 million monthly active users and 7.7 million daily active users on the Facebook platform.
As of 24 February 2014, Wooga was the 43rd highest grossing app developer on the Apple iTunes Store, and 78th highest grossing on the Google Play platform, according to App Annie.