Wooga is a mobile-first game developer in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

, Germany. The company develops free-to-play mobile and social games for mobile devices, such as

smartphones A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which ...

and tablets and

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

s like

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

The company's name comes from the words "World of Gaming".

History

Wooga was founded in January 2009 by Jens Begemann (

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

), Patrick Paulisch (

Co-founder An organizational founder is a person who has undertaken some or all of the formational work needed to create a new organization, whether it is a business, a charitable organization, a governing body, a school, a group of entertainers, or any other ...

) and Philipp Moeser ( CTO). Patrick Paulisch has since left Wooga. In July 2009, Wooga launched its first game, ''Brain Buddies''. The game reached 5 million monthly players 3 months after launch. The company received €5 million in a round of funding led by

Balderton Capital Balderton Capital is a venture capital firm based in London, UK, that invests in early-stage, technology and internet startup companies in Europe. It is considered to be among the four-biggest venture capital firms in the English capital. Foun ...

in November 2009. Holtzbrinck Ventures, which had provided funding earlier that year, also participated in this round. In February 2010, Wooga launched its second game, ''Bubble Island'', which reached 4 million monthly players in 8 weeks. In May 2010, Wooga launched its third game, ''Monster World'' Wooga announced in July 2016 that Monster World would be shut down on August 31 after 6 years due to a decline in the number of players. In November 2010, Wooga launched ''Happy Hospital''.http://www.wooga.com/games/ Wooga.com, Games-Page In March 2011, Wooga launched ''Diamond Dash'', released in December for iPhone and iPad on the iOS App Store. In March 2012, Wooga announced that ''Diamond Dash'' had been downloaded over 11 million times since launch. Wooga raised a Series B Round of $24 m funding in May 2011. '' Magic Land Island'' was launched during the

GDC Europe The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutori ...

in August 2011 in

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western States of Germany, state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 m ...

. In June 2012, the

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

game was

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

d under the name ''Pocket Island'' on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

under

MIT license The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

and with the assets under

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

CC BY-NC-SA A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

. In March 2013, Wooga launched both ''Monster World'' mobile for iOS and ''

Pearl’s Peril ''Pearl’s Peril'' is a hidden object game developed by Berlin-based Wooga. It was launched on 5 March 2013 on the Facebook social media platform and on 5 September on iPad. Pearl’s Peril is Wooga’s sixth game, and was the company’s fastest ...

''. Pearl’s Peril became the company’s fastest selling game. On 10 April 2013, Wooga launched ''Pocket Village''. In May, they launched ''Fantastic Forest'' and ''Kingsbridge'' on the 21st and the 28th, respectively. In February 2014, ''Fantastic Forest'' was relaunched as ''Farm Tales''. On 22 August 2013, '' Jelly Splash'' launched on iOS. The game was subsequently released on the Facebook.com platform in September 2013, and on Android in October 2013. Wooga also launched ''Jelly Splash'' as a test title for the Korean

KakaoTalk KakaoTalk (Hangul: 카카오톡), commonly referred to as KaTalk (Hangul: 카톡) in South Korea, is a mobile messaging app for smartphones operated by Kakao Corporation. It was launched on March 18, 2010, and it is available on mobile and deskto ...

platform on 9 November 2013. In December 2013, ''Jelly Splash'' reported monthly active users of 8.2 million. At the GDC 2014, CEO Jens Begemann presented the company’s new development approach, which he calls the “hit filter”. The focus of this new approach is to create two hits per year. On 20 May 2015, Wooga launched ''Crazy Kings'' (developed by TicBits). On 6 October 2016, Wooga launched ''Bubble Island 2''. As of July 2018, the company employs 200 people. In December 2018, Wooga was acquired for more than US$200 million by Israeli gaming company Playtika.

Portfolio

Facebook Games

* ''Diamond Dash'' (15.5 million monthly active users and 2.4 million daily active users) * ''Bubble Island'' (3.3 million monthly active users and 0.5 million daily active users) * ''Monster World'' (3.0 million monthly active users and 0.7 million daily active users) (Wooga reported in July 2016 that Monsterworld would be closing down after six years due to a decline in the number of people playing the game. See facebook/or contact wooga support for more info.) * ''Magic Land'' (0.3 million monthly active users and 61k daily active users) * ''Happy Hospital'' (0.1 million monthly active users and 7k daily active users) * ''Brain Buddies'' (0.2 million monthly active users and 9k daily active users) * ''Kingsbridge'' (0.3 million monthly active users and 36k daily active users) * ''Farm Tales'' (0.7 million monthly active users and 89k daily active users) * ''Pearl’s Peril'' (4 million monthly active users and 1.4 million daily active users) * ''Jelly Splash'' (8.4 million monthly active users and 2.1 million daily active users) * '' June's Journey''

Smartphone games

* ''Diamond Dash'' *''Bubble Island'' * '' Jelly Splash'' * ''Pearl's Peril'' * ''June's Journey'' * ''Agent Alice'' * ''Futurama: Game of Drones * ''Tropicats'' * ''Bubble Island 2''Appdata.com - wooga
" Retrieved on 20 May 2011.

References

{{reflist, 30em

External links

Official website
Video game development companies Video game companies of Germany Companies based in Berlin