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For gaming studio TapZen, the main focus last week was bringing their first game, a real-time strategy battle game called “This Means War,” to market. Last week also happened to be the week they closed an $8 million round from Chinese Internet giant Tencent.
A couple years ago, the company raised a round led by Zynga so they could go into stealth mode to develop tablet-focused, strategy games. TapZen’s founders Mike Verdu and Amir Rahimi are Electronic Arts and Zynga veterans; they honed in on the tablet and strategy-focused games at these gaming giants before starting their own venture.
“They are innovating in every way possible,” media rep Amanda Taggert said. "No one is really focused on what the tablet can do. And they created the strategy genre when they were working at EA, creating the command-and-conquer genre and games of real-time strategy.”
The team, which is over 20 people, is based in LA with an office in San Francisco. The new capital will not go towards a massive hiring spree as Verdu is concentrating on “purposefully growing slow and tactically.”
“At Zynga I was running eight studios, building 12 products and overseeing 600 people,” Verdu told the Wall Street Journal. “The bolt of lightning that struck me was that what swings the company was one good product. It could be a 12-person team. You do not need hundreds of people to create millions of dollars in value."
The capital instead will go towards creating games in their niche, although no games have yet been named as being next-up to launch, Taggert said: “At the end of the day, it’s always a core group of people concentrating on making awesome strategy games for tablet.”
