It’s easy to see why Frosmo, a Helsinki-based company that makes a tournament platform for social games, wants to expand into the Asian game market. It’s the next logical step, since the Finnish company has already spread its tournament game system across Europe.
Now the company will let 10 different Asian game companies use its tournament system. Those sites — 51.com, China.com, Ren Ren and Mixi — can reach more than a billion people.
Mikael Gummerus, managing director, said in an interview yesterday that Frosmo is having great success with its meta game, a time travel game that lets players compete through different eras from the Stone Age to the present. You can challenge your friends to tournaments in 70 different casual games that take just minutes to play. You can also enter tournaments with strangers to win virtual currency. You can win currency in a tournament, but it costs you money to play. The company’s games now attract about 400,000 unique visitors a month.
Gummerus said the company will keep adding apps to its network of games. Frosmo has 20 employees in Finland and has now added five in Beijing. The company gets its games from about 40 game developers who have partnered with it.
In the games, players can watch their overall Frosmo rank increase as they play more games and share experiences with friends. Gamers can play the Frosmo-based games by logging into their favorite Internet portals, on Frosmo.com using Facebook Connect, or through the new Facebook app, which goes live today.
Frosmo gamers can team up and interact with each other while they play. They can progress through the ranks as a team, and the team rises in rank based on how well the gamers play. Frosmo has its own virtual currency, known as Frollars, which players can win in the tournaments or purchase with real money. Users can also upgrade to premium accounts.
The company signed up its first white-label commercial service partner, MTV 3 Finland, in May 2008. It also provides tournament services for China.com, which has 10 million unique monthly visitors; Yahoo Middle East (formerly Maktoob) with 15 million visitors; Sanook.com, Thailand’s largest Internet portal with 5 million visitors; and Ekolay, a Turkish site with 3 million visitors. Frosmo’s service now has 3 million gamers worldwide, and the company is betting it can grow to 15 million gamers by the end of 2010.
Frosmo competes with the likes of Zynga, Playfish and a host of casual game sites. Its investors include Riistos Silasmaa, a member of Nokia’s board. It raised 1.4 million euros from the Finnish government and has also raised two rounds of angel money.
Before founding Frosmo, Gummerus was managing director of E-Sports Nordic. But he spun Frosmo out of that company once he saw its potential. Rivals include Mind Jolt, which has 14 million unique monthly visitors.
