Bioware, Zynga and EA veterans launch freemium start up
Rumble Entertainment wants fast action and better visuals for free to play games
A team of experienced industry executives have joined forces to launch new free to play developer Rumble.
"The Rumble team includes veteran developers, executives and product leaders from Zynga, Activision, BioWare, Blizzard, Playdom, Electronic Arts, Turbine, FooMojo and RockYou," says the start up's site.
"Our team has helped ship 20+ platinum selling games, launched multiple social games played by millions and created billions of dollars of value for stakeholders."
Rumble Entertainment plans to develop games for mobile and PC that have AAA production values but a freemium business model. It will publish its first games in 2012, and will also act as a publisher for third party titles.
CEO and founder Greg Richardson was previously CEO of Bioware/Pandemic before the company was sold to EA in 2007. He's also been the VP and GM of EA Partners, and more recently sat on the board for Gazillion Entertainment.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Richardson explained that Rumble will focus on making games accessible, and used Madden Football as an example.
"It's still a game that has a 100-page manual. Why not make things intuitive to understand?"
The list of employee also includes John Yoo, formerly the lead designer of Zynga's hugely popular CityVille, and Mark Spenner, who was VP and GM and EA, where he founded what would become Bioware San Francisco.
Rick Thompson, founder and chairman of Playdom, is a board member and the start up's lead investor. The company has already raised $2 million in seed funding.