My brother and I will announce later today that cafe.com has sold Boonty to Nexway.
Boonty has been the initial business of the company, started in 2001. At the time our idea was to sell downloadable games trough the big portals of the world. Now that we have the appstore, Itunes, XboxLive, Wiiware and others, it may seem obvious but back then lots of people thought we were crazy.
We got the idea in 2000 when we saw the Napster phenomenon. Whereas the industry was trying to solve the piracy issue with lawsuits and DRM, we thought that the problem could easily be solved with an easy to use, extensive and cheap offer.
The funny thing is that initially we wanted to sell hard core titles.
Having started our first internet company in 1995 and sold it to IconMedialab of Sweden in 1999, we thought we would have enough credibility to meet most of the major publishers and convince them to try something new… but they all turned us down. Why bother selling online when they were making so much money in retail? And why take the risk of piracy? My brother and I almost gave up. However we stumble upon a few independent game developers selling casual titles and willing to give download a try. It was instant success and the starting point of the casual game revolution that has become so big today.
We grew quickly all over Europe, US and Asia from 2002 to 2005. We raised our first VC round in 2004 after my brother and I and business angels funded the initial stage. From 2005 to 2007, we had harder times and we had to turn the company around to come back to profitability only at the very beginning of 2008.
Boonty is now a very profitable business and growing quickly. I am glad Nexway bought it. It is a fantastic, fast growing, profitable (and big) digital download company. You will hear a lot form them in the next few years.
This is a very important turning point for cafe.com. From now on, our team will focus 100% on growing our social casual game web sites. Cafe.com is a place where casual gamers play, win and meet others within a friendly, safe, social environment. Cafe.com features more than 30 highly addictive casual games wrapped inside a social networking experience.
My favorite games are Temple of Mahjong, Busta Fruit and Absolute Solitaire. We will launch exciting new original games in the next few days, I can’t wait !
Initial technical work started in 2006 and Cafe.com was launched to the public in May 2008 in the US and a few weeks later in France and Germany.
Today over 5 million people play Cafe.com social games every month. This is quite an achievement after only 9 months in operation and near zero marketing budget! The site targets the primary casual gaming audience, which is more than 50% women with 60% of the entire audience being over 26 years old.
From the beginning, Cafe.com’s business model has been based on micro-transactions and rich media advertising, a successful model started in Asia and now being adopted by other entertainment companies.
100% of the all-cash deal will be reinvested into cafe.com.
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