MindJolt got a lot of goodness with its acquisition of mobile game maker SGN back in April. Mobile game revenues now account for a third of MindJolt’s revenue and the company recently released five more mobile games.
The results show that MindJolt is well on its way to having three legs of a stool in terms of business diversification, with businesses focused on Facebook, the web and mobile. Altogether, MindJolt’s games have been installed more than 100 million times.
“This feels like success,” said the company’s chief operating officer, Colin Digiaro, in an interview. “We’ve also begun to generate a lot of revenue through virtual goods purchases.”
The former SGN crew is turning out to be a productive bunch. The team recently launched the games Warp Dash, Master Shot, DressUp!-Fashion, and Mini Café. The LA-based company also recently re-released the SGN flying combat simulation game Skies of Glory.
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“All of these games hit at about the same time, and it shows we’ve made a lot of investments,” Digiaro said. “The good thing is that we can now distribute our games to a sizable installed base.”
In the past, MindJolt generated most of its revenue via ads or paid downloads. But under free-to-play, users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. Virtual goods — mostly from mobile games — now account for about a third of the company’s sales.
Digiaro said that the company plans to launch seven more iOS games later this year and will build franchises inspired by SGN properties DressUp-Fashion!, Fluff Friends, and Bird’s the Word. That’s a big change from the company’s position just five months ago, Digiaro said.
MindJolt has had more than 30 million mobile installs, 70 million social network installs and 25 million web installs. Rivals include Zynga, Electronic Arts, Glu Mobile and a wide variety of others. MindJolt is led by the team that founded MySpace and it has funding from Austin Ventures.
Over time, Digiaro said that the company will expand to the Android platform.
“Overall, we think mobile is a fantastic market,” Digiaro said.
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