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Scoreloop: We're sitting in the iPhone social gaming sweetspot

A future based on challenges and virtual currency

Scoreloop: We're sitting in the iPhone social gaming sweetspot
Yesterday German mobile social gaming technology provider Scoreloop announced it had raised €2 million from its second round of funding.

We caught up with CEO Marc Gumpinger to find out how the investment would be used, as well as his views on the increasingly fierce competition in the iPhone social networking sector.

Pocket Gamer: How hard was it to raise money in the current financial situation?

Marc Gumpinger: I think we're sitting in the sweetspot. It's not just our technology or the market we're in, but we can point to the success we've had thus far and the things we've been doing right.

Primarily, we've handled challenges between players very well. We consider this to be the key interaction defining mobile social gaming. That's what we've pioneered and it turns out to be the right thing to do. That's what the investors saw.

How do you ensure challenges between players are interesting?

There are two ways. The first is challenging your friends. There are a number of ways of getting friends into your Scoreloop community. You can use your contacts list. You can invite them by email. You can invite them by Facebook.

Secondly, there's the option to challenge people you don't know and we offer a number of ways to make sure these people are not so anonymous.

The first is gamer profiles, and part of this is a sophisticated skill matching algorithm that makes sure we present you with players of like skill. Or you can directly tap someone on a highscore list.

So it's all about player discovery that invites you to find your opponent and, in turn, this leads to the discovery of other Scoreloop-enabled games that contain these challenges. The whole thing becomes a launchpad.

Why did you release a Scoreloop app. Will you become a consumer brand?

No. We are an infrastructure company. This is a key thing when we're talking to big publishers and operators. We're not competing with them as a consumer brand. We focus on what we know best, which is infrastructure.

Scoreloop is only available for iPhone at the moment, but how cross-platform could it be?

We started with iPhone but the infrastructure isn't only designed for mobile. We're technology agnostic and could connect a Wii or PC to the server. But we will remain in the mobile market for the mid-term. We believe there is a lot of business to be done in the mobile space.

Do you think in future, it will become more important to sign deals with big publishers rather than small developers?

We have very good relationships with the indie developers because there are hit titles there, but now we have the funding to expand and address the bigger publishers and operators.

Releasing a product is one thing, but having the corporate structure to be able to talk to the really big guys in terms of support and integration and stability, it takes a lot more funding. So we want to stick with the indie developers but expand aggressively with the bigger publishers.

What new features will you be offering?

Everything we do is focused around challenges. We offer the best product in that area, and we think it defines mobile social gaming so this is our market.

How did your in-game virtual currency come about?

We were playing online games and we noticed that often when you're about to win, your opponent will drop out of the game, which is very frustrating. This is how we came up with the idea for the virtual currency. We didn't do it for its own sake but because it adds value to a challenge. The opponent can still drop out but it has to cost them something.

How does your business model work?

It's based around the virtual currency. You get some coins for free when you download games, invite friends or win challenges, but ultimately if you run out of coins, you have to purchase them and this is where the money comes from.

This model obviously works elsewhere on the web and the nice thing is not only can we offer Scoreloop to developers for free but we can share revenues with developers. This also goes hand-in-hand with the wider gaming trend as we move from selling the game once to games as a service.

How will developers be able to use the coins?

At the moment we use the currency just for challenges but we are going to open this up and let developers use it for other things such as selling levels. We don't care where the coins are spent. The developer gets a share wherever the coins are spent in their game.

Finally, there are a lot of competing companies in this space, so how will Scoreloop stand out?

I think it will come down to who can invest in their product and show they will be around for the longterm. This investment means we're here to stay.

I'd also like to say we're very accurate in terms of what we announce. All our numbers, in terms of the number of developers and games using Scoreloop, are correct and all the features we're announced are available right now.

Thanks to Marc for his time.

Game developers can learn more about Scoreloop and download the free SDK from its website.

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.