![]() So that first pivot was called Watercooler. I told him he could either give back the $250,000 we’d given him or find something else to do with it. MI: Kevin and his three co-founders were trying to build a better LinkedIn, but we found out with the seed money that we gave the company that it wasn’t working. I wanted to start a social network for young professionals, but after some twists and turns, it became a gaming company. This was in 2006, when Facebook was still mostly focused on college students. KC: I was definitely excited about what was happening with the consumer internet. At what point did you know you wanted to create a gaming company? In fact, Kabam was incubated at Canaan’s offices. TC: Kevin, you spent a little time working for Maha as a junior investor at Canaan before founding Kabam. His earliest investor, Maha Ibrahim of Canaan Partners, joined the conversation to share her perspective on the company’s highs, lows and in-between moments, too. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Late last week, we talked with Kevin Chou, co-founder and CEO of the gaming company Kabam, about his own both stressful and euphoric experience in running a gaming startup for roughly a decade before selling most of its assets in December to South Korea’s Netmarble Games for a reported $700 million to $800 million. Add Comment.The Game Developers Conference kicked off in downtown San Francisco yesterday, and consolidation is a central theme for this year’s attendees. We've contacted both developers for comment.ĭo you think Kixeye has a case against Kabam? How or when do you think Facebook developers will rise from this level of interaction and give up on the copycat games? Sound off in the comments. In fact, Zynga-which has a lawsuit on its plate from SocialApps over allegedly misused source code from its game myFarm that led to FarmVille's inception-knows the feeling very well. Keep in mind that these sort of exchanges aren't uncommon to Facebook games. ![]() ![]() Kabam CEO Kevin Chou said in response that Edgeworld, which hovers at about 200 thousand monthly players since its launch, draws inspiration from "movies, pop culture, science fiction, literature, history and, most importantly, from our players." That's in addition to borrowing ideas and techniques from its previous four games. Kixeye went even further, according to Gamasutra, to compare Kabam's hit Kingdoms of Camelot with fantasy strategy game Evony as evidence that Kabam "is wasting talent and resources on cloning games that already exist." Whoa, those are some pretty harsh- and specific-claims. "It's not detrimental to Kixeye in the short term, but this kind of practice is bad for all of us in the gaming industry - it will eventually sour users and it certainly does the opposite of proving that Facebook can be a legitimate gaming platform." "There is no question that the engineers of EdgeWorld had Backyard Monsters open in one window while they coded the copy in another," Kixeye CEO Will Harbin said in a statement. Of course, Kabam firmly denies the allegations. ![]() Gamasutra reports that Kixeye has publicly accused Kingdoms of Camelot creator Kabam of copying the hit Kixeye game Backyard Monsters in creating EdgeWorld, Kabam's brand new Facebook strategy game. Alright, so it's more serious than that, but we just can't help but envision these debates happening in schoolyards rather than public forums. ![]()
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