A Bit Lucky Puts Nexon’s $5 Million Toward New Games, on Facebook and Beyond
A Bit Lucky, the social gaming company behind train-themed Facebook simulation Lucky Train, has received $5 million in a second round of funding from South Korean online game publisher Nexon, the developer has confirmed with us.
“We are going to use our funding primarily to expand our team and develop new titles,” co-founder Frederic Descamps says. “Our main goal is to create a new generation of super high quality multiplayer online games on Facebook and other platforms.”
Descamps shared a bit more about the developer’s “trans-gaming” strategy when we spoke with him last October. At that time, he was relatively unworried by the growing need for advertising as Facebook restricted viral marketing potential via communication channels.
“Advertising is one of the only user acquisition channels you can dial up quickly and efficiently, at will… provided you have large budgets,” Descamps tells us today. “As a resource-constrained start-up, we have spent very little on advertising with Lucky Train. We actually stopped all advertising back in November. Our public numbers… dropped following that but, interestingly enough, all our internal numbers and our revenues kept growing.”
The game launched at the beginning of August last year and reached all-time highs of 336,000 daily active users and 2.05 million monthly active users in November, according to AppData, our data service tracking traffic and growth for apps and developers. It has since fallen to 154,000 DAU and 1.02 million MAU today.
Nexon’s $5 million brings A Bit Lucky’s funding up to nearly $8 million. The initial $2.6 million round of seed funding attracted investments from SV Angel, Founder Collective, Felicis Ventures, IGN CEO Mark Jung, Google head of M&A David Lawee, and others.
