Press

High-Tech Gründerfonds invests in playnik.com. Hamburg-based gaming experts set sights firmly on international expansion for 2009.

June 23, 2009

wwg worldwidegames GmbH, the provider of the innovative browser game portal playnik.com, has received € 500,000 venture capital from the High-Tech Gründerfonds. This amount was co-financed by Oliver Jung, Torsten Oppermann and Holtzbrink Ventures. The financial resources are primarily intended for the development of new games and gaming concepts and form the expansion into core foreign markets. Agreements have already been made with a number of notable preliminary partners throughout Europe, including the Spil Group and the Scandinavian Sanoma Group. A partnership with a well-known international corporation is on the verge of being finalised and expansion into the American market is imminent.

“We expect fast growth in the browser gaming market and are confident that Playnik will be able to position itself successfully within this market. People who play browser games are principally interested in interacting with other players, both teammates and opponents. The portal’s innovative community features address precisely this need – this is a concept that has convinced us” said investment manager Björn Momsen, explaining why High-Tech Gründerfonds decided to invest in the Hamburg-based company.

Gaming portal playnik.com has been making waves in the browser gaming market for around a year now and offers innovative gaming features alongside numerous social networking functions. These include top lists covering several games, comprehensive feeds and unique awards for activities successfully completed.

“With our award system and the interactivity of our games on the one hand and the portal on the other, users are offered additional benefits that are truly unique in the field of browser games. In playnik.com we have created a level of depth in the games and experience that has never before existed in this way on the market. The skyrocketing number of users shows us that we have chosen the right strategy”, said managing director Malte Paul, commenting on the functionality of the portal.
The additional integration of games from third-party providers allows playnik.com to offer its users a comprehensive and varied range of titles and enables developers to be involved in the long-term success of their games. “Playnik is positioning itself as a perfect symbiosis between innovative gaming features and state-of-the-art social community functionality. We are the one-stop shop for fans of browser games”, added managing director Malte Paul.

About playnik.com:
Playnik.com is the first next-generation browser gaming platform in the world, offering the advantages of both a focussed community and of a gaming portal. Playnik.com is the very first platform to offer innovative gaming features such as the cross-game Nik score, a comprehensive award system and has many more innovative social gaming features. Playnik is currently operating twelve games, with top titles including Mission Cobra (the first mission-based secret agent game), Kiez King (probably the most popular game set in Germany’s “sinful mile”) and Desert Blitz (the current military strategy game).

Contact:
wwg worldwidegames GmbH
Paul Malte
Richardstrasse 45
22081 Hamburg
+49 40 25330280
info@playnik.com
https://playnik.com

About High-Tech Gründerfonds
High-Tech Gründerfonds invests venture capital in young, high-opportunity technology companies implementing promising research results in an entrepreneurial manner. The start-up companies are planned to lead their R&D projects to the production of a prototype or a “proof of concepts” or market launch by means of seed financing of up to 500k EUR. High-Tech Gründerfonds has a fund volume of around 272m EUR. Investors of the public-private partnership are the Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology, the KfW bank group as well as the six industrial groups BASF, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, Robert Bosch, Daimler and Carl Zeiss.

Contact
High-Tech Gründerfonds Management GmbH
Dr. Björn Momsen
Ludwig-Erhard-Allee 2
53175 Bonn
Tel.: +49 228 – 965685-00
Fax: +49 228 – 965685-50
info@high-tech-gruenderfonds.de
www.high-tech-gruenderfonds.de

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