Wooga Moves Into Mobile Gaming With Forthcoming iOS Version of Diamond Dash

Europe's Wooga is becoming the latest social gaming company to make a leap to mobile with an iOS version of Diamond Dash slated to come out later this summer. Up until now, the Berlin-based company had been laser-focused on the Facebook platform and gradually grew its base of monthly actives to overtake EA's Playfish and Playdom earlier this year. They're now at 34.9 million monthly actives, according to AppData. Now the company is planning to add iPhone and iPad games this summer and launch a brand-new experimental HTML5 title later this year. Diamond Dash is its biggest game on the Facebook platform with 10.1 million monthly active users. Even though rival Zynga has been on iOS for more than two years and other competitors like Crowdstar and Playdom have made the leap already, Wooga's chief executive Jens Begemann said he didn't feel like the company was coming late to mobile. "We feel the timing is right. For us, it's not about sprinting. We're not in here to sell the company in a year," he said. "We think that our audience and our target group is coming onto mobile now." Begemann said the company plans to stick to sales of virtual currency and goods to earn revenue. He doesn't anticipate relying on advertising. He's also hiring the team to build the iOS apps locally and the group has been operating independently of the Facebook Diamond Dash team. With the company's recent $24 million round led by Highland Capital Partners, Wooga has staffed up to 90 employees. "We know that if we copy the Facebook game, we won't be successful," he said. The iPad game feels more or less like the Diamond Dash on Facebook. It's a Match-3, puzzle game where players have to get rid of colored blocks when they form groups of three or more. On the iPhone version, Wooga made the grid of diamonds smaller but it isn't really perceptible to the end player. As for the name of the game -- Diamond Dash -- which resembles Playfirst's line of "Dash" games, the two companies settled their differences earlier this year. The compensation from the agreement involved no cash payments, Begemann said. So it is likely some sort of revenue share. The terms are undisclosed. As for the HTML5 version, that's effectively how the company plans to come to Android for now. The web app should be accessible on multiple devices. Begemann declined to comment on reports of Facebook's mobile platform project, in which the company is expected to build an HTML5 version of the site complete with games from its biggest third-party developers. Like many game developers, Wooga is experimenting with the promise of HTML5 even though at the time being, native applications often have smoother performance. He said Wooga would likely use a number of different monetization methods for the HTML5 game, while relying on Apple's in-app payments for the iOS version.

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Wooga Moves Into Mobile Gaming With Forthcoming iOS Version of Diamond Dash

Kim-Mai Cutler

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Kim-Mai Cutler