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Revised video game financing list: 115 game companies raised $663.1M in 2009

2010-03-09 10:00
Update: We ve added our list with new fundings we ve heard about from readers and Engage Digital Media . Game startups continued to score big investments in 2009, but the amount of money raised in the year fell considerably compared to 2008. We 8217;ll be discussing the funding levels at our GamesBeat@GDC conference on Wednesday in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference. Our revised analysis shows that 115 game startups raised $663.1 million in 2009, down 29 percent from a year ago. Last year we tallied 112 companies that raised more than $936.8 million, not counting fundings with undisclosed amounts. The 2009 year was looking pretty weak until Zynga scored $180 million in a deal with Russia 8217;s Digital Sky Technologies. Zynga has more than 235 million monthly active users playing games such as FarmVille (pictured, right), and it makes money on its free games through the sale of virtual goods. Zynga 8217;s funding actually beat out the biggest funding of last year: China 8217;s 9You, which raised $100 million in the spring of 2008, long before the financial crisis hit in the fall of last year. Clearly, valuations were down because of the recession. Were it not for Zynga 8217;s big raise, 2009 would have been an abysmal year, down 48 percent from a year ago. This year, the average amount raised was $5.7 million, while last year it was $8.3 million. These fundings mean lots of innovation ahead and continued employment for game industry veterans. We know not all of these companies will last. But the successful ones will create revenues, profits and jobs in the years ahead. Weв ve ranked them here in order of the amount of money raised, and I 8217;ve linked to our coverage of them. Fundings where the amounts werenв t made public are listed at the end. If youв ve heard of others, please note in the comments and weв ll add to the list. The list includes companies that raised funds in prior years but disclosed for the first time in 2009. It 8217;s likely that some companies from last year 8217;s list or this year 8217;s have gone out of business. If so, let us know in the comments. We 8217;ll acknowledge our method is imperfect. As was the case last year, we have dozens of deals where we don 8217;t know the exact amount raised (we have listed them alphabetically at the end). We know that OnLive raised a substantial round, but the exact amount wasn 8217;t disclosed, and so it is not included in our figure for 2009. We expect that we 8217;ll be revising the list upward as we add more deals that we didn 8217;t know about in the coming weeks. 1. Zynga 8212; $180 million for social games on Facebook. Investors: Digital Sky Technologies, Institutional Venture Partners, Andreessen Horovitz, Tiger Global. 2. Playdom - $43 million for social games on Facebook, MySpace and other platforms. Investors: Rick Thompson, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. 3. Smith Tinker 8212; $29 million (includes seed round) for hybrid web-toy Na...
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