Scopely invests $20M in casual game maker Burlingame Studios
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Scopely has made a $20M investment in Burlingame Studios, a new game studio started by veterans of casual games.
Chris McGill, CEO of Burlingame Studios, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the team has about 20 to 30 people already, depending on how you count full-timers and contractors. The studio will focus on casual mobile games, he said.
Many of the veterans are alumni from Glu and CrowdStar. The latter created the highly successful free-to-play game Design Home as well as Covet Fashion. The deal is one of a number of moves made by Los Angeles-based Scopely, which has been busy raising money of its own and investing heavily in game talent. In October, Scopely bought GSN, the maker of the Wheel of Fortune game, from Sony for $1 billion.
McGill said Burlingame Studios sees Scopely as a partner, as Scopely has a bunch of game studios as well as its Playgami tech platform for crafting and optimizing mobile games.
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“Like with Design Home, we’re making apps that have game mechanics, and they’re targeted at people who don’t consider themselves to be gamers,” McGill said.
Games like Design Home are the company’s foundation, but not necessarily an indication of what it is doing, he said.
“We think that we’re actually expanding the gaming pie rather than fighting for the finite amount of people who consider themselves to be gamers,” he said.
Scopely’s ecosystem aims to build game teams with “incredible talent density where the traditional boundaries between developer and publisher are eliminated.”
McGill most recently served as senior vice president and general manager at Glu Mobile. Glu
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