Bits Blog: Hard-Core Gamers Try Building Social Games

RumbleA scene from a Rumble game.

Social game makers like Zynga have gotten hundreds of millions of people to play their games, but one of the big raps on FarmVille, CityVille and other Facebook time-wasters is that they’re too shallow to appeal to hard-core players.

A company called Rumble is part of a new wave of hard-core social games startups that are trying to change that. Founded by a group of executives from Electronic Arts, Activision and other traditional game companies, Rumble, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., says it has raised $15 million from Google’s venture capital arm and Khosla Ventures.

Greg Richardson, Rumble’s chief executive, is a former Electronic Arts executive who ran the game developer BioWare/Pandemic while at the private equity firm Elevation Partners. He said Rumble was aiming to make games for mobile devices like the iPad, for Facebook and for the Web that rival the depth and quality of console games. Mr. Richardson echoed a common criticism of Zynga games, which are viewed by critics as finely calibrated exercises in frustrating players so they spend money to speed their progress.

“At their worst, they’re monetization moments masquerading as games, as opposed to something people fall in love with,” Mr. Richardson said in an interview.

Rumble is developing two games. One of them is a medieval action role-playing game that he declined to say much about. A video of that game shows a knight slashing away at opponents as he makes his way into a castle.

Epic Games, an established developer of hard-core games,  has created a mobile sword-fighting game with high-quality graphics for iPhones and iPads called Infinity Blade.

While the yet-unnamed Rumble game doesn’t appear to be as graphically rich as the latest titles for an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, its fidelity is very high compared to the cartoony graphics that are common in most Facebook games.

The Rumble game is scheduled to be released during the first half of 2012, while the second game from the company is expected to be released by the end of summer 2012. A number of other companies are also beginning to cater to hard-core gamers through Facebook, among them Kixeye and Kabam.

Rumble’s games, like Zynga’s, will be free and supported by the sale of virtual goods. It remains to be seen how different Rumble’s games will be from Zynga’s in their attempts to tease open players’ pocketbooks. Mr. Richardson said Rumble wants players to pay for items only when they see value, not when they are “artificially manipulated” into making purchases.

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