On their website, they have a very good news for their users. Scoreloop has been acquired by RIM. They noted that the focus is to get Blackberry gaming platform to move to the next level. And they promise that they will see that Blackberry platform is “unparallelled”.
What just happened is an industry consolidation which will continue in the early part of this decade. With RIM buying this German mobile social gaming community, they want to elevate the BB platform and possibly rekindle the old spark in BB they have lost since the arrival of iPhone.
Scoreloop was founded in March 2008 and has raised more than $2.8m. The initial plan was to provide multiplayer challenge games with a focus on iPhone. But it deviated and then moved into the domain where community of developers could work to add socialgraph and interactions on their games. This include the scoring sheet, messaging, virtual currency, etc. As they made progress, Android evolved as the centerpiece of their strategy as more works seemed to make it the primary operating system. But with time, it supports all the leading mobile OS. Scoreloop supports Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and Bada (Samsung) operating systems. We are not sure if the HP Palm WebOS is supported by Scoreloop. Also, Symbian has no information.
This is the entry on CrunchBase.
Scoreloop focuses on building the best mobile gaming technology to extend any game to the social arena. Scoreloop is neither a game developer nor publisher, and therefore does not compete within their market. Instead, Scoreloop cooperates with all players of the mobile gaming value chain – from game developers and aggregators, to publishers and portals – to maximize their gamers’ experience, improve their community’s cohesiveness, and provide them with additional revenue streams.
RIM will bring the Scoreloop technology to the blackberry. This has a potential to make the Blackberry Social Platform better. Scoreloop technology has made it a strong contender for the consolidation wave as more companies are looking for social games in their mobile ecosystems. When DeNA bought Ngmoco in a $400m deal, it made it clear that the industry was not timid on games. Also the Electronic Arts bought Chillingo for $29m while GREE went for OpenFeint in excess of $100m.
So, it is very obvious that anyone without a game strategy could be in peril right now. That is why what RIM has done on Scoreloop makes sense. The team will bring expertise to the BB gaming environment and possibly help it challenge the competitions that other OS like iOS and Android are mounting. But Rim is in catch up mode now. With the new iOS5, Apple has incorporated iMessage which can compete with BBM which has found followers in the teen market. The Apple Game Center platform is also a huge challenge for Rim to mount against.
Though BB is a business focused product, it cannot ignore that the line between business and leisure has blurred. So by moving agreeively into the social climate of games in its products, Tekedia believes they did the right thing. Gaming has never been the catch for business applications, yet, it will not hurt by providing it to wage off competitions to its core market. Apple continues to churn out blockbuster games through the armies of developers, with games leading the Apple Apple store download in recent months. For BB to move from its tepid gaming history and success, Scoreloop seems to be the right move.
Our conclusion is that this is a good acquisition and BB users in Nigeria and indeed Africa will get better value when BB service is fully integrated with Scoreloop technology. Nigerian developers that are already working in the Scoreloop community will easily migrate to offering solutions to BB gaming platform. We think that RIM did a good deal.