Titan Gaming raises $1M for game tournament platform

Titan Gaming has raised $1 million in funding for its white-label game tournament platform. The Los Angeles-based company has created a platform that makes it easy for game publishers to launch online game tournaments with any games.

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The funding comes from a set of angel investors that includes William Quigley and Jill Armstrong, principals with Clearstone Venture Partners; Brock Pierce, virtual goods pioneer; Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com; Kamran Pourzanjani, cofounder of PriceGrabber.com; Carlos Bhola, founder of Kikin; Eric Pulier, founder of SOA Software; Jeffrey Tinsley, founder of MyLife; Adam Walker, co-founder of Hydra; Andrew Frame, founder of Ooma; John Lee, GigaMedia executive; Andy Mazzarella, chief executive of PatentVest; Scott Walker, CEO of Revenue Apex; and SAM Venture Partners.

Titan was founded in 2006 and it has 24 engineers. It has invested 100,000 hours to develop its tournament platform, which lets players take each other on in online game competitions for points or cash. In the case of cash competitions, Titan’s partner acts as a matchmaker and takes a matchmaking fee in the form of a percentage of the amount wagered.  That fee is usually 10 percent to 15 percent.

Titan’s new executive team includes John Maffei, chief executive; and Lisa Serwin, chief operating officer. The company is using the funds to complete the platform and secure mass distribution deals. The original founders of Titan, Francisco Diaz–Mitoma and Mark Donovan, will lead Titan’s technical and game developer evangelism efforts.

The first customers are expected to begin using the Titan Platform in July. The customers will use the platform and publish online games under the names of the publishers, not Titan, in what is known as a “white label” arrangement. Maffei has a 15-year-background in global tech companies and was previously head of the online game firm ZAM Network.

Rivals include Come2Play, BunchBall, and CyberArts.

It will be interesting to watch if Titan Gaming can snare an audience. Game publishers want to monetize online game better, but past competitive gaming companies haven’t had the best luck with tournament play business models. Frosmo, based in Europe, is trying to launch a tournament platform on Facebook.