Moblyng's Shutdown: Enthusiasm For HTML5 Gaming is Still a Little Premature

Moblyng, an early player in HTML5-based mobile games, has reportedly shut down -- a sign that it's still tough out there for companies that want to build a profitable gaming business without relying on native apps. The company, which raised around $17 million in several venture rounds plus an investment of an undisclosed size from Motorola Mobility, is shutting down and laying off its 20 employees, according to VentureBeat. We reached out to chief executive Stewart Putney who hasn't yet replied for comment. “We did not monetize enough to stay in business,” he told VentureBeat. He added, "I remain very confident HTML5 will be a great platform for social games and media, it is simply a question of when.” Moblyng, which started life as slideshow-creation company Fliptrack around five years ago, later pivoted to HTML5-based mobile gaming. With so much funding behind it, it put much of its chips into the launch of Facebook's HTML5-centric mobile platform this year. Moblyng was one of Facebook's launch partners when the company unveiled new viral channels for mobile apps in October. It unveiled Social Poker Live and Word Racer alongside much bigger gaming partners like Zynga, Wooga and Storm8. Both games had a slow start, not the explosive rush out of the gate that the very first Facebook developers saw when Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the original platform in 2007. Both games saw more momentum in recent weeks, however. Social Poker Live and Word Racer Live have racked up 280,000 monthly actives and 120,000 monthly active users respectively. Still, it's far from the hundreds of thousands of daily active users a company would need to operate in the casual space successfully, let alone the fact that paid conversion rates on HTML5 are still probably lower than they are in native apps. Facebook still likely only has a fraction of the more than 225 million users that Apple has payments information on through iTunes. Secondly, many of the HTML5-based games that debuted on Facebook's mobile platform had usability and latency issues. Even the HTML5-based version of Zynga's Words With Friends wasn't so responsive when we tested it. Because the technology is still a ways away, many of the HTML5-based gaming companies we've seen have gone for talent acquisition-style exits like Rocket Pack (which Disney bought) and Dextrose (which Zynga acquired).

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Moblyng's Shutdown: Enthusiasm For HTML5 Gaming is Still a Little Premature

Kim-Mai Cutler

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