This month Tamatem, a mobile games publisher got 3.5 million dollars in funding, although that’s not all for the industry. Today we knew that the mobile startup company FunCraft secured $1.8 million in funding. This investment was led by Play Vanturas with contributions from the CEOs of Gucci and Huuuge Games. Also, Mark Pincus, Zynga’s co-founder plus Harry’s and Warby Parker, co-founders of Allbirds contributed as well.
FunCraft will focus on “casual forever” games
Martinez told GamesBeat that Funcraft is aiming to “create new genres and make mobile games that are daily rituals in our players’ lives.” They will focus on “casual forever” games like Candy Crush, Dice With Buddies and Zynga Poker. However, Martinez wants to put his touch and differentiate from usual the hypercasual and puzzlers games.
Martinez admits that the best time to start a gaming company was 20 years ago but that “the second best time is now”. He said that “Fresh games from new gaming companies are having success on the previously static Top Grossing Games chart. Talented, experienced game makers with a clear vision can create and grow new genres. And so we’re putting our money where our mouth is — leaving our jobs at gaming giants, Electronic Arts and Zynga — to head out on our own.”
The studio doesn’t want to compete with big companies
Before FunCraft existed, Micheal Martinez and Jason McGuirk had a studio called JuiceBox Games which shut down in 2016. They learned that they don’t want to compete with the strengths of industry behemoths like King, Playrix, Peak and Voodoo. He added: “We think we are creating a market that larger companies will be interested in two to three years from now. We think we can do to puzzle games what Peak with Toon Blast did for match-3 games by adding social and a deeper metagame.”
