Kabam, makers of social and free-to-play games like The Godfather and Kingdoms of Camelot, have acquired Wild Shadow Studios, best known for the highly popular online combat game Realm of the Mad God.
If you thought DeNA's deal with Disney was their last big expansion, you'd better think again. With recent announcements from both Kabam and Nimblebit in partnership with the DeNA-owned Mobage social gaming network, one of Android's largest social gaming services is bound to get even larger.
It looks like the Year of the Dragon is upon us in full force! We've seen new stages in Angry Birds Seasons, new items in Hidden Chronicles, new dragons in Dragonvale, and now Kabam's Dragons of Atlantis is joining the party with a major update of its own.
In a press release issued today, Kabam, who described themselves as "a leading developer of free-to-play hardcore social games" (wait, is that an actual term now?), announced that they have acquired the social game developer Gravity Bear, their combat role-playing game Battle Punks, and everything in-between. Thus, the trend of larger social game developers consuming smaller ones continues unabated.
Do you love playing social games but hate launching a browser and navigating to a particular website just to play them? Now Download.com, Kabam and SweetLabs are teaming up to take social games out of the browser and put them right on your desktop. The companies will be utilizing SweetLabs' Pokki desktop app to create a new home for Kabam games like The Godfather: Five Families, Edgeworld, Thirst of Night and Dragons of Atlantis.
Despite making a decent sized "boom" on Facebook with games such as Dragons of Atlantis and Kingdoms of Camelot, Kabam is not content with having all of their eggs in one basket, so in a surprise move, they're bringing games to both iOS and Kongregate.
We're live blogging from the Inside Social Apps 2012 Conference in San Francisco, from Philz Coffee a few blocks a way. While other attendees discuss and pretend to understand such industry jargon such as "velocity" and "ad mediation," I sip my favorite coffee in the world and type away. The big takeaways from the show so far: Facebook Credits conversion rates are much lower than expected and you need to spend a lot of money to make it big on the iPhone and Android platforms. If you are a small developer, life is tough.