Natural Motion raises $11m to increase mobile development
Developer looks to US talent and partners for expansion
Games and technology developer Natural Motion has raised $11 million from Benchmark Capital to increase development capacity for mobile games.
Speaking to GamesIndustry International today, CEO Torsten Reil said that a significant portion of the funding will be dedicated to finding new staff and partners in the US.
"It's all about getting to scale," he said. "This is to push the technical side with our proprietary engines and we've established a really strong console quality team, but at the same time we are aware of the fact that mobile doesn't work if you make games that have play sessions that are ten, fifteen minutes at a time."
"We're scaling up our internal development capacity substantially, that's our number one priority"
Torsten Reil
"You have to have games that are playable within a few minutes. We're scaling up our internal development capacity substantially, that's our number one priority. But as we have in the past we'll also work with external developers as well."
"There's a of high calibre talent both in product leads and product managements sides, as well as in engineering," said Reil of the US. "We've been really lucky with the progress that we've made there and we're building up a great team over there."
The company has released six mobile games so far and all have been top ten iOS hits, the most successful of which is My Horse with 10 million downloads.
Reil said it's now time for mobile games to break out from the pack using high-end visuals and the power of smartphones.
"We believe this is a huge opportunity right now in the industry. We're moving to the next wave of mobile social games. Rather than having 2D resource management games that all look similar it's possible to create something that really awes audiences because the devices are consoles in our pockets"
"We're focusing on combining really high-end visuals with mobile game usage patterns, so you can play these games in short bursts with a long-term progression arc."