SoftBank Ventures invests in Game Developer Playnery

Earlier today, SoftBank Ventures announced a 4 billion won investment in social mobile game developer Playnery together with Qualcomm and Stonebridge. Playnery, founded in October 2011, received attention early on for its team of developers which previously worked for the well-known game developer Gala Lab. The company was also the first company to make a partnership with the world’s largest social gaming company Zynga which has over 300 million users.

The first title ‘Mother of Myth’ is a social action RPG where the player can experience the life of a hero on a mission against the background of Greek myths such as Acis, Glatea, the Battle of Thermopylae and Hercules. The game can by played via a web browser and all mobile devices using the game engine which streams 3D graphics in real-time.

Investment Manager at SoftBank Ventures Seo Il-shik said, “In the future we predict that the social and mobile market will break off from the casual gaming seen up until now, and achieve rapid growth with the diversification of genres such as MORPG, MMORPG and FPS. When various user groups form and the market grows rapidly, we expect that Playnery will become a successful game developer through high quality games and global partnerships.”

Playnery CEO Henry Park said, “We plan to launch Mother of Myth in 2013 in 12 different languages including English, Spanish and Italian. As we predict that the already large social and mobile game market will double in size over the next 2-3 years, we expect working with Zynga will help Playnery in growing as a global game company.”

SoftBank Ventures continues its investment in online and mobile games after investing in SundayToz in 2010, which early this year launched the hit game “Anipang”.

Find out more about Playnery and its upcoming products at the company’s website.