Facebook may dominate the social game market, but it isn’t the only show in town. Viximo has made a good business out of providing games to dozens of smaller social networks. The company is announcing today that it reaches more than 100 million users.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Viximo is a kind of middleman that takes games from promising developers and makes them available to web sites to embed on their own sites, as if they were their own games. Its success so far shows there is life beyond Facebook, the world’s biggest social network with more than 500 million users. The company recently added MyYearbook and CafeMom as partners. The network also includes Bebo, VZnet, and IMVU. Earlier this year, Viximo’s games only reached about 60 million users.
“We are bringing the idea of social games as a service to the market of smaller social networks,” Strang (pictured, on right, with co-founder Brian Balfour, left) said.
The social networks can always cut out the middleman and get developers to design games directly for their web sites. But that often comes with a lot of hassles and it’s not that easy to get the attention of game developers these days, said Dale Strang, CEO of Viximo, in an interview. Each social network usually takes a small number of games, anywhere from one to eight, from Viximo’s available library of titles. Viximo adds value by simplifying the process for deploying games and making money from them, Strang said.
One of the biggest new partners is IMVU, which recently pivoted from being a virtual world for teens to a social game web site. Among Viximo’s 15 games today are Fishdom by Playrix, Backyard Monsters by Casual Collecitive, Famandia by Plarium, and Resort World, by GameInsight. Some of the partners are quite big; StudiVZ in German has 16 million unique montly visitors. Rivals include social networks that commission their own games as well as companies such as Heyzap.
Viximo was started in 2007 and it has 25 employees. It competes with rivals such as PlaySpan. Viximo has raised two rounds of money from North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners.
Companies: Facebook, Viximo
People: Dale Strang
Kelly Hu Michelle Rodriguez Mena Suvari Georgina Grenville Michelle Trachtenberg
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