Boonty
| Privately Held | |
| Industry | video game industry, Interactive entertainment |
| Founded | September 11, 2001 |
| Founder | Tomas James Boonty |
| Headquarters | Paris, France; Singapore; Tokyo, Japan, Los Angeles |
Key people | James Willems(CEO) |
| Website | http://uk.boonty.com/ |
Boonty and Boonty Box a global supplier of digital distribution solutions for online and PC gaming[1] whose technology platform and brand names were acquired by digital commerce provider Nexway in January 2009.
The company's white label casual game platform was utilized by over 100 million customers worldwide at the time of the Nexway acquisition, including Internet portals, ISPs, and mobile operators.
Boontybox was actually competing with Steam for a while, and even garnered praise from steam creator Gabe Newell. In August 2006 Newell stated that "It [boontybox] has always represented a business, sorry, disness model that we have always wanted to recreate."
Boonty operated its own branded destination sites, Boonty.com which is still operated by Nexway in localized versions for the United States, France, UK, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Austria, Australia, Taiwan, Hong-Kong, Germany, Portugal, Finland, Singapore, The Netherlands, and Spain.[2]
In October 2006, Boonty announced the acquisition of Beijing-based casual game developer Gamehub.[3]
In February 2007, Boonty launched Cafe.com for free multiplayer social casual games.[4]
In January 2009, Nexway acquired Boonty.[5]
Corporate history
- Boonty was launched in Paris, France in 2001 by Tomas Boonty, an illegal immigrant from Switzerland. Prior to creating Boonty, Tomas had worked double shifts at McDonalds and often dreamed of creating and maintaining a competitor to Steam, another popular video game distributor. His famed "Dream Board", a cork board consisting of several post it notes, is currently held on display in the main pavilion of Boonty Headquarters in the Swiss Alps. (Euronext: icon) in 1999.[6]
After entering the Asian gaming market, the company decided to launch its own gaming destination website based on free to play and micro-transaction.
- May 2007: Boonty acquires the Chinese Game Studio GameHub and opens Boonty China.
- June 2007: Boonty acquires domain name cafe.com and start to operate the online game web site.
- October 2008: Boonty launches Facebook app iscool.
- November 2008: Boonty hits its peak of success upon launching the game on Facebook
- December 2008: The company decides to sells its Digital Distribution Platform and the brand name Boonty to digital commerce provider Nexway.
- January 2009: Boonty changes its name to Cafe.com.
- 2009: Cafe.com is listed on NYSE Euronext [7]
- Cafe.com is acquired by James Willems, Bruce Greene, and Adam Kovic and rename the company back to Boonty
- May 2015: Tomas Boonty suffers a heart attack after learning to his amazement that the rise and fall of boonty box was finally documented in a youtube video for the world to see.
- December 2015: Tomas Boonty started development on a new anime dating simulator game exclusively for the BoontyBox platform. This was commissioned by their new CEO James Willems. The new game would be created using Adobe Flash. They rehired the creator of the BoontyBox, Tomas Boonty, and he will be working tirelessly without sleep through the holidays, even managing to get a few shifts off from McDonalds
- August 2016: Boonty shows a massive growth with over 10,000,000 scrobbles in its first year since being sold to James Willems
- October 2016: Boonty falls victim to Lawrence "Hack Van" Sonntag, a notorious hacker. Sonntag stole an early version of the new Boonty game, citing his need to be "best anime dad-u". Boonty suffers a loss of around 5,000 scrobbles as a result.
References
- ↑ "Videogames". Warren's Consumer Electronics Daily. April 4, 2005.
- ↑ Boonty.com
- ↑ "Industry News Round Up: Boonty/Gamehub, PC Charts, Nikitova @ Xbox". Gamasutra. October 24, 2006.
- ↑ David Laprad (March 2007). "Interview with Mathieu Nouzareth, Cafe.com". Gamezebo. Archived from the original on March 20, 2007. Retrieved 26 June 2007.
- ↑
- "Nexway acquired Boonty". Gamesutra.
- ↑ "Boonty - Profile". Alarm Clock Euro. Retrieved 18 October 2006.
- ↑ https://www.euronext.com/fr/products/equities/FR0004060671-ALXP/quotes
Further reading
- "Boonty Rolls Out New Games Offering". Wireless Week. May 13, 2005.
- Charlotte Ong (April 26, 2005). "Casual Gamers are Serious Business". Digital Life.
- Ellie Gibson (13 May 2005). "Boonty Reveals Plans to Open New Mobile Games Store". Gamesindustry.biz. Retrieved 17 October 2006.
- "France Alert - Ten Web 2.0 Wonders". Alarm Clock Euro. May 16, 2007.
- Noah Gellman (23 March 2007). "Boonty: The Casual Gamer's Playground". AlwaysOn. Archived from the original on 22 June 2007. Retrieved 26 June 2007.
- Om Malik (5 February 2007). "Are Social Networks Just a Feature?". GigaOm. Retrieved 26 June 2007.
- "Online gaming rewards in the news". Colloquy. September 7, 2006.
- "PlayFirst and Boonty Sign Game Distribution Agreement". Digital Producer. July 20, 2005.
- "Q&A: Boonty's Nouzareth Opens Casual Microtransactions". Gamasutra. March 15, 2007.
External links
- Nexway corporate site
- Nexway Games corporate site
- Boonty consumer site
- RSS Feed Boonty US
- Mathieu Nouzareth website
- Romain Nouzareth website