In another sign that the gaming industry is feeling little of the broader economy's pain, Trion World Network, a two-year-old game developer that has not yet released any titles but has a portfolio in development, has raised $70 million in venture funds.
"We were fundraising the week that Bear Stearns was collapsing," says Lars Buttler, founder and CEO of Trion and a former executive at Electronic Arts Inc. [ERTS]. "Things weren't as bad as they've been this past week, but they were still pretty dire, but we were able to gain immediate traction."
Buttler said one possible difference he noticed was a sense that companies could require more capital to effectively launch a successful business.
"To some degree, people felt more comfortable that we were raising a larger amount of money so that we could build a better portfolio," he said.
The $70 million funding is the company's third and brings its total raised to $100 million. The Series C round was led by Act II Capital and included participation from all previous backers, including DCM and Trinity Ventures, Rustic Canyon Ventures of Santa Monica, Calif., Time Warner Inc. [TWX], Bertlesmann and Peacock Equity, a joint venture of GE and NBC Universal. (Rustic Canyon Ventures is an investor in The Deal LLC.)
Trion's approach to gaming is to use the growing popularity in broadband Internet and cloud computing to create games that are available online, rather than bought off the shelf, and can be regularly updated and changed. Unlike packaged games, which can't really evolve after they are sold, Buttler said that Trion's games will be more like television show pilots when they are launched, so that individual users can make changes and Trion's developers can gather feedback to make their own adjustments, eliminating the "boring" areas of the game that no one ever visits. He said this more fluid approach to game development would help it to offer popular games and also protect them from piracy, since they exist in a sophisticated server architecture.
"You'd have to replicate the entire server, and even if you could, once the games become server based, users are changing them all the time." - Andrea Orr
See Sept. 23 announcement on new funding from Trion World Network
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