News

Traplight Games raises $500,000 to launch user-generated social racer What on Earth!

Serial investors Nikolaj Nyholm and Henric Suuronen involved

Date Type Companies involved Size
October 28th, 2014 investment East Wings
Finnvera Ventures Capital
Sunstone Capital
Traplight Games
$0.5m
Traplight Games raises $500,000 to launch user-generated social racer What on Earth!

It isn't just Helsinki that's a hot location in Finland when it comes to F2P mobile games.

Second city Tampere is also getting in on the act, as underlined by the news that TrapLight Games has closed $500,000 in seed funding.

Set up in 2010, the studio consists of 12 staff, who have experience in companies working with companies like Supercell and RedLynx, not to mention previous employment with Disney, Warners, Sega and LucasArts.

The investment has been provided by VC companies Sunstone Capital, Finnvera Venture Capital, and East Wings.

Other angel investors were involved including Henric Suuronen, who's the president of Nonstop Games, which was acquired by King early in 2014, in deal potentially worth $32 million.

As part of the deal, Sunstone Capital's Nikolaj Nyholm - who was an advisory at Minecraft developer Mojang - joins Traplight's board of directors.

"We are thrilled to get such extensive experience on board with Traplight Games," said CEO Riku Rakkola.

Giving the community control

In terms of what the money will be used for, Traplight's current project is its user-generated, social-leveraged, goal-orientated comic racer What on Earth!, which is due for release on iOS in early 2015.

A physics-based sidescrolling title, a key feature is that all levels, challenges and live events are created by the players.

"Even in Finland you rarely come across a team as talented as Traplight Games. Their first game is re-imagining the casual racing category in a magic way that combines super-addictive gameplay with user-generated content and social interaction," commented Suuronen.

"Letting players create great user-generated content on mobile and tablet is difficult," added Sunstone's Nikolaj Nyholm.

"Traplight has created an editor which is genuinely fun to use with amazing results to show."


Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.