In just one month, Danish startup Nonoba said it has signed up 100 customers for its GameRise content management system, which makes it easy for anyone to set up a professional-looking game web site.
Among the customers are four portals, including sites in the Netherlands, China, Slovenia and Portugal. GameRise lets casual game developers manage a catalog of games and display them in up to 26 different languages. It also provides tools to create and manage chat rooms, forum discussions, and mail templates for user feedback.
The Copenhagen-based company describes itself as a kind of Ning for casual games sites –a reference to internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen’s Ning, which makes it easy for anyone to set up a social network. Developers just sign up and, upon receiving approval from Nonoba, can customize their own site as needed.
About 30 makers of Flash games were testing the tools since February, and we wrote about Nonoba when it debuted a month ago. The company was founded in 2008 with executives from Skype, Joose and Lycos Europe. The company raised an undisclosed amount of money in June, 2008 from Mangrove Capital Partners. The company is expanding its presence in the U.S. market.
Examples of the sites that use Nonoba are here, here, here and here. Besides providing the management system, Nonoba has software tools that make it easy to set up payment systems and multiplayer arenas for gamers. There are thousands of casual games — those that take a short time to play — on the web. Now Nonoba has made good progress toward making those games more viable and accessible to more consumers.
Still, it raises the question: are there just too many casual games out there?