Art Of Crime partners with Habbo Hotel SVP
Family MMO Crimeville set to expand after success in Scandanavia
Art Of Crime has joined forces with Christian Batist, best known for his role at Sulake as senior vice president of Habbo Hotel, to expand its Crimeville franchise.
Crimeville launched in beta in 2010 for the children's market, and currently has an accompanying card game in Denmark. It hopes to expand globally in 2012, beginning with the Benelux territories.
"This partnership means a lot to us. Christian experienced first-hand the challenges Habbo's online world had from its birth to managing well over 300 million registered users," said CEO Ida Brinck-Lund.
"We'll be able to benefit from his experiences and present what next generation companies like us must develop to become really successful internationally. We've got a super in-house team and now amazing partners so we're ready to deliver."
The 6-13 year old target demographic of the game will pit the MMO up against popular existing products like Penguin Club and Moshi Monsters. Art Of Crime is also planning an augmented reality mobile game, merchandising and a television show for Denmark.
"I'm completely blown away by Crimeville as a theme, from the play perspective and now also as a business opportunity," said Batist.
"I believe that Crimeville can become a global brand, bigger than most of the successful online games today and I haven't seen a single online game company that has developed a total cross media strategy from scratch AND designed the whole platform for a cross media expansion before launch. In being so young in the market with good results, I believe, Crimeville can be a global phenomenon."
The game currently has 80,000 registered users across Scandinavia.
"We see old business models dying, but there are a range of new ones surfacing," added Brinck-Lund.
"We believe the future lies in breaking existing value chains in order to create new business models, because tweens don't differentiate between platforms and nor should we as companies. Having an expert like Christian Batist agreeing with this is huge, because he has a history of being at the right time and the right place."