Funzio Nabs 1.5M Downloads For Modern War in The Week After Launch

Funzio, the San Francisco-based developer aiming to find true balance between offering social games on Facebook and on smartphones, said its second big mobile game Modern War has surpassed 1.5 million downloads in a single week. Modern War is Funzio's second big mobile game after Crime City, the mafia-themed title it successfully ported from Facebook over to iOS. One-and-a-half million downloads plus a top 10 grossing rank in the U.S. is a strong start. Keep in mind though that many of the top 10 apps generally cross 100,000 downloads per day at this point and Funzio's numbers are most certainly helped along by aggressive and optimized spending on marketing plus cross-promotion from Crime City. Modern War uses a similar engine as Crime City, but it appeals to a slightly different demographic. "We're targeting a slightly different fan base. You can have people who are fans of Grand Theft Auto and you can have fans that lean more toward a Call of Duty or Battlefield-style game," Funzio's vice president of business development Jamil Moledina told us at the time the game launched. Modern War has all the classic hallmarks of a military-themed RPG where you can do jobs like attack enemy units, bomb their bases and develop your own military installation. There's a paid currency called 'Gold' that can speed up tasks and an earned currency that players accumulate by doing jobs. The difference between Modern War and other games from the same genre is that Funzio has put a lot more detail into the artistic look and feel of the game. Instead of pure menu-based gameplay, which was more popular in Modern War's RPG predecessors, the game shows animations of bombers flying overhead. Like Crime City, there are also avatars that walk around and attack each other. "Nobody has really tried to take realism into the social game versions of these classic genres, so I think that's where the opportunity is," he said. There's also a social element that lets players battle others depending on how well they've trained their units in attacking and defending. "We wanted to evoke the real risks of war, where you risk your own troops in combat," Moledina said. Funzio, which recently took $20 million in a round led by IDG Ventures and IDG Capital Partners, now has around 88 employees. The company's mission is to offer true cross-platform gameplay, unlike other competitors who tend to focus on one or two platforms. Earlier this year, we would've said that competency in one platform does not necessarily translate to competency in another, as evidenced by some early false starts on iOS from social game developers like Crowdstar, Zynga and Booyah. But the second half of 2011 has proven that there are companies that can do it and simultaneously maintain hits on iOS and Facebook.

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Funzio Nabs 1.5M Downloads For Modern War in The Week After Launch

Kim-Mai Cutler

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