Multi-device social gaming platform Sibblingz has raised $1 million from incubator YouWeb. YouWeb previously invested a $500,000 seed round in Sibblingz in 2008.
Sibblingz allows developers to simultaneously create games on Facebook as well as iOS and Android devices, allowing players to continue the same social game as they switch between devices. The platform also offers the developers the ability to monetize free-to-play games with virtual goods.
The company’s cloud-based game creation platform, Spaceport, allows game developers to build a game once, using Javascript, and have it play across all smartphone operating systems, with a native app-like experience and fast performance. The web-based games run as a hybrid HTML5 – native app, and the code for the game is written once, in a simple scripting language, so that they can then run on any device. And developer can also create native iOS apps as well using Spaceport.
The updating process is also relatively simple for developers using the platform. With Spaceport, developers just need to revise the JavaScript code for their game in the HTML page once. After doing so, they will see immediate updates take place in their game across every device.
Peter Relan, founder of YouWeb, believes that the gaming space is currently at an important crossroad, as mobile gaming ramps up and developers look the HTML5 as a cross-platform technology. As my colleague MG Siegler reported earlier this summer, Facebook has a secret plan, called Project Spartan, to bring applications to the mobile web via HTML5.
Relan says that developers are all working on ways to go mobile. In the middle of this sits Sibblingz. Sibblingz’s Spaceport allows developers to create HTML5 games that are compatible with Project Spartan through an HTML5 canvas-rendering engine available for iOS and Android.
Sibblingz founder Ben Savage says that the startup is working with multiple Facebook game developers who are preparing for Project Spartan. And all of them want to be the Zynga of mobile gaming.
Savage and Relan contend that Sibblingz can help accomplish this goal through its native-rendering as well as via its HTML5 game creation technology.
Sibblingz, which is profitable, already makes ‘millions of dollars a year’ in revenue from share fees from games using its technology. The funding will help Sibblingz ramp up Spaceport as more developers utilize the game engine to create HTML5 based cross-platform titles.
Spaceport will soon be revealing its Facebook gaming partners (we know that the engine is being used by CrowdStar, another YouWeb company), and will be made generally available to all Facebook and mobile developers in the coming month.