wooga, the company behind the popular Brain Buddies application, announced today that they have secured $7.5 million from Balderton Capital as a follow-up to the first round of funding from Holtzbrink Ventures we covered earlier this year. Since August, Brain Buddies has surpassed Playfish’s popular “Who Has The Biggest Brain?” application. With Playfish’s $400 million sale to Electronic Arts earlier this week, it’s not surprising to see additional signs of investor confidence in the social gaming space.
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This week two of the largest social gaming developers, Playfish and Playdom, announced that they are opening offices in San Francisco. Is this part of the massive Silicon Valley “revival” that the BBC described yesterday? I doubt it but it’s clear that no matter where the social gaming companies are hiring from, San Francisco and the bay area in general, are important for any growing internet startup.
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Yesterday night while I was upgrading AllFacebook I noticed an interesting trend among some of the top gaming applications: they’ve been plateauing. While many of the applications have been able to pull off remarkable growth (Farm Town for example), a lot of the large gaming applications have appeared to experience a slow down in what was previously phenomenal growth.
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