Mastermind Studios. From top clockwise: Matt Pahl, Tim Robles, Sumit Agarwal, and Dan Chao
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Mastermind Studios: A star mobile gaming team breaks off on its own (exclusive)

Mastermind Studios is coming out of stealth today as a new mobile game studio founded by a team of proven hit makers. IDG Ventures and IDG China provided the initial funding for the San Francisco startup.

The core team includes four veterans who worked together at Gree as well as at Funzio. Their games included Crime City, Modern War, Kingdom Age, and War of Nations. Collectively, those games have generated a couple of hundred million dollars in revenue — a very large amount for mobile games. In fact, the Funzio games did so well that Japan’s Gree paid $210 million for Funzio in 2012.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.