Big game
Charlottetown mobile games company receives major funding
Fueled by millions of dollars in funding, a Charlottetown-based mobile games company is looking to more than double its staff.
Icejam has secured $3 million from Halifax-based Build Ventures, a company that focuses on early stage technology companies across the Atlantic region.
Patrick Keefe, general partner of Build Ventures, joins icejam’s board of directors.
Icejam issued a statement Tuesday saying funding will help develop the company’s proprietary new Playable Data Platform and prepare its first game for market later this year.
He expects the company to “easily double’’ the current staff of 13 in Charlottetown over the next six months, adding to its team of designers, developers and marketing personnel.
Icejam has now raised a total of $3.5 million in capital funding.
Located in Charlottetown and Toronto, the game studio received $707,095 in provincial government funding last year.
Icejam’s Playable Data Platform integrates real-time, realworld data streams into the mobile game to enhance gameplay while solving key engagement and retention dilemmas that face the mobile games industry.
“While the traditional mobile games market is consolidating and investments are down, there remains great interest in transformative technologies that play with the boundaries of imagination and reality,’’ says Stuart Duncan, founder and CEO of icejam.
Duncan pioneered free-toplay (F2P) mobile games with his previous company, Bight Games, with the likes of The Simpsons: Tapped Out, which is estimated to have generated more than $130 (US) million in revenue.