Ensemble Studios was an American video game developer. It was founded by Tony Goodman in 1994 and incorporated the following year. It borrowed the name of Ensemble Corporation, a consulting firm founded by Goodman in 1990. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2001 and operated as an internal studio until 2009, when its development capabilities were officially disbanded. Ensemble developed many real-time strategy games, including the Age of Empires game series, Age of Mythology, and Halo Wars. In addition to game development, Ensemble Studios also made the Genie Game Engine used in Age of Empires, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, and Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. The studio sold 20 million games and was worth an estimated $500 million.
KingsIsle Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Round Rock, Texas. Founded in January 2005 by Elie Akilian, the company operates a development studio in Round Rock, Texas, which hosts the majority of its staff. KingsIsle is best known for its massively multiplayer online role-playing games, Wizard101 and Pirate101. After Media and Games Invest acquired KingsIsle in January 2021, Akilian spun off the mobile games segment as Wimo Games.
Strawdog Studios Ltd. is a video game developer based in Derby, United Kingdom. The studio was established in 2003 and develops games and applications for mobile phone, iOS, Android, PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo DS.
King, also known as King Digital Entertainment, is a Swedish video game developer and publisher that specialises in social games. Headquartered in Stockholm and London, and incorporated as King.com Limited in St. Julian's, Malta, King rose to prominence after releasing the cross-platform title Candy Crush Saga in 2012. It is considered as one of the most financially successful games utilising the freemium model. King was acquired by Activision Blizzard in February 2016 for US$5.9 billion, and operates as its own entity within that company. King is led by Riccardo Zacconi, who has served in the role of chief executive officer since co-founding the company in 2003. Gerhard Florin took over Melvyn Morris's role as chairman in November 2014. As of 2017, King employs 2,000 people.
Zynga Inc. is an American developer running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its mission as "connecting the world through games".
Ngmoco, LLC was an American-based publisher of video games for the iOS and Android platforms, and a subsidiary of DeNA Co., Ltd. The company was founded by former Electronic Arts executive Neil Young in July 2008. Since its founding, ngmoco has had more than seven million combined game installs. Venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Norwest Venture Partners, among others, have financed the company with a combined total of US$40.6 million. The company is most well known for their publishing of the Rolando game series and Eliminate Pro.
FarmVille is a series of agriculture-simulation social network games developed and published by Zynga in 2009. It is similar to Happy Farm and Farm Town. Its gameplay involves various aspects of farmland management, such as plowing land, planting, growing, and harvesting crops, harvesting trees and raising livestock. The sequels FarmVille 2 and FarmVille 3 were released in September 2012 and November 2021, respectively.
Playdom was an online social network game developer popular on Facebook, Google+ and Myspace. The company was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area by University of California, Berkeley graduates Ling Xiao and Chris Wang and Swarthmore College graduate Dan Yue. In 2009, the market for games played on social networking sites was valued at $300 million, consisting mostly of online sales of virtual goods.
Rock Band was a 2009 rhythm game developed by EA Montreal and published by EA Mobile for the iOS. Part of the Rock Band series, it is second game in the series to be released for mobile devices, following Rock Band Mobile (2009). The game was released through the App Store in several regions on October 19, 2009.
Game Center is a service by Apple that allows users to play and challenge friends when playing online multiplayer social gaming network games. Games can now share multiplayer functionality between the Mac and iOS versions of the app.
Words with Friends is a multiplayer computer word game developed by Newtoy. Players take turns building words crossword-puzzle style in a manner similar to the classic board game Scrabble. The rules of the two games are similar, but Words with Friends is not associated with the Scrabble brand. Up to 40 games can be played simultaneously using push notifications to alert players when it is their turn. Players may look up friends either by username or through Facebook, or be randomly assigned an opponent through "Smart Match". Players can also find potential opponents using Community Match.
Zynga Poker is a social game developed by Zynga as an application for the social-networking website Facebook as well as Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Windows, MySpace, Tagged, and Google+. It was launched in July 2007.
Supercell Ltd is a Finnish mobile game development company based in Helsinki. Founded on 14 May 2010, the company's debut game was the browser game Gunshine.net, and after its release in 2011, Supercell started developing games for mobile devices. Since then, the company has fully released five mobile games: Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars and Squad Busters, which are freemium fast-paced games and have been very successful for the company, the first two generating revenue of €2 million per day in 2013.
Chess with Friends was a multiplayer asynchronous chess game developed by Zynga with Friends, which also developed Words with Friends and Hanging with Friends. It was one of the first iPhone games to take an asynchronous approach to multiplayer. Released in November 2008 and published by Zynga, the game is available on iOS and, since 2014, Android.
Word Streak is a word game developed by Zynga with Friends for iOS and Android and released in January 2012. Gameplay is similar to that of Boggle—players try to find as many words as possible in a jumbled 4x4 grid of letters by connecting adjacent letters to form words within a two-minute time frame - though with extra features and a different scoring system. Words may be formed vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. Scramble with Friends is one of the top ranking games in the iOS application store, available as both a free ad-supported version and an ad-less paid version. Scramble with Friends replaced Scramble Challenge at the end of 2011, but did not retain the solitaire option of the latter.
Clay Jam is a claymation mobile game created by UK developer Fat Pebble and published by Zynga for iOS and Android mobile devices. It was released on November 29, 2012 on iOS and Android. The handmade, stop-motion game was created in a UK garage by Fat Pebble developers. In the game, players guide a clay ball over a series of hills with the objective of squashing monsters on the way down. As of November 2018 the game is no longer available on the Google Play Store, along with Play-Doh Jam, their Play-Doh-related sequel, which is still unavailable on the App Store.
Candy Crush Saga is a free-to-play tile-matching video game released by King on April 12, 2012, originally for Facebook; other versions for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 10 followed. It is a variation of their browser game Candy Crush.
Crash Lab is an independent British video game developer. The company was founded in November 2011 by Steve Ellis, Martin Wakeley and Lee Musgrave
The popularisation of mobile games began as early as 1997 with the introduction of Snake preloaded on Nokia feature phones, demonstrating the practicality of games on these devices. Several mobile device manufacturers included preloaded games in the wake of Snake's success. In 1999, the introduction of the i-mode service in Japan allowed a wide variety of more advanced mobile games to be downloaded onto smartphones, though the service was largely limited to Japan. By the early 2000s, the technical specifications of Western handsets had also matured to the point where downloadable applications could be supported, but mainstream adoption continued to be hampered by market fragmentation between different devices, operating environments, and distributors.
Proletariat, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded by Seth Sivak and former Zynga industry veterans in 2012.
