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  • Ubisoft Acquires Singapore Based Social Game Pokerama

    Dec
    18
    posted by Mohan Belani on Friday, December 18, 2009 at 12:31pm Categories: Blog

    ali zaki pokeramaIt seems like they did, though the official announcement has not been made yet. Judging from the footer of this page, it is quite clear that Ubisoft has in fact acquired Pokerama. Pokerama was the first Made-in-Singapore game out of Game Ventures, a company building social gaming based products. Their other sites include xuqa.com, the largest social gaming site in Turkey, and their most recent hit, Howzat, a real-time multiplayer cricket game. Interestingly, this could very well be the first Singapore made social game to have been acquired. Sources mentioned that the deal had been brewing for the last couple of weeks, resulting in a 6 figure cash exit for the founders.

    Pokerama
    Pokerama was born during the heydays of the launch of the Facebook platform. The highly popular poker game added a great deal of social elements to it games, thus fanning it’s viral wings. Interestingly though, the founders have not been paying much attention to it, especially since they wanted to focus more of their attention on xuqa.com and Howzat. While the site was growing and generating revenue (no figures disclosed), it had become a side project for the founders with little interest on their part to grow. The fun started when Ubisoft came along..

    Ubisoft and Social Gaming
     I remember Ubisoft from the days of Myst and the Rainbow Six series (I feel old!). They had made their mark in the “boxed game” era and just like every other game publisher out there, casual gaming and social gaming have been on their radar for a while. They had opened up a San Francisco office not too long ago, and had recently announced various initiatives to propel them into the social gaming space. This included a Facebook game as well as a portal called Ubifriends, which would allow their users to directly access all their Facebook games. Their first game, which was launched on Facebook sometime around July this year, was called Tick Tock. It revolves around quizzes about your friends as well as bombs, quite a lethal mix I would say. More details about the game can be found here. Their strategy seems to be in rapidly building smaller social games, but with a much wider appeal (quizzes for tick tock and poker).

    While the founders will be focusing more of their efforts on Howzat from now on, they will still be involved with Pokerama by helping Ubisoft maintain and further develop the game. Game Ventures seems to be heading in the right direction with their products. Even their newly launched Howzat (which we will be reviewing ourselves) got a pretty good review recently. These guys could very well be the Zynga of Asia, but hopefully without all the bullshit scam stuff that Zynga has been doing.

    ubisoft acquires pokerama
    has been working on for the last few weeks, took over 10+ days ago.
    first game built as game ventures, first game launched in singapore, and probably first game bought out
    based on xuqa’s game engine..
    it’s probably ubisoft’s biggest game on the social gaming space
    they have a working r/s with ubisoft to maintain and develop the game further in the future..
    6 figure exit total cash exit
    ubisoft wants a big social gaming strategy – openeed up sf office just to do it.
    pokerama was revenue generating before
    reason they sold it was becuz it was the 3rd focus after xuqa. essentially sold so that founders could concentrate on howzat
    some revenue was being generated
    roughly current users go FB on pokerama on pokerama stats
    some changes already seen at pokerama


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