April Digital LA Interviews: MMOABC.COM
Online gaming is huge. We all know that but are there Southern California startups that actually has presence in the online gaming space? So far the only one that I’ve heard buzz about has been GirlGamer. At last month’s Digial LA Drinks event, we ran into an MMO company that has really good traction in the MMO space called MMOABC. We caught up with CEO/Founder Andy Tong and asked him to talk about his company. MMO aka massively multiplayer online game and MMOABC is able to power that community. Most MMOs charge through subscriptions for the games but MMOABC is one of the few that offers the service for free. In addition to playing the games for free, they also offer hosting and publishing features for game developers. MMOABC is about a year old and has raised about 500k in Angel Round funding. The business model for MMOs is that they make money from online subscriptions. For MMOABC, they generate revenue from their other hosting services. Here’s a list of the Top 10 MMOs based on popularity so you can see what the landscape looks like.
1. World of Warcraft, released 2004 – 8.5 million subscribers.
2. Habbo Hotel, released 2000 – 7.5 million active users.
3. RuneScape, released 2001 – 5 million active users.
4. Club Penguin, released 2006 – 4 million active users.
5. Webkinz, released 2005 – 3.8 million active users.
6. Gaia Online, released 2003 – 2 million active users.
7. Guild Wars, released 2005 – 2 million active users.
8. Puzzle Pirates, released 2003 – 1.5 million active users**.
9. Lineage I/II, released 1998 – 1 million subscribers.
10. Second Life, released 2003 – 500,000 active users.
(Source: GigOm)
MMOABC may not be on this list but comparing data from Compete, Quantcast and Alexa it looks like they get about 50k to 100k visitors a month. Their traffic is on the uptrend. However, as a local Southern California company, MMOABC it’ll be interesting to see if they can sustain that trend as MMOs is a really compeitivie market. But then again, so is any online market nowadays. :) Here’s the interview with Andy Tong below:
