Six Degrees Games Announce $7M from Clearstone and Prism

Last week news of a $7 million investment in Six Degrees Games leaked in quarterly financial reports. Today Six Degrees officially announced that it had raised $7 million in a round led by Prism VentureWorks and Clearstone Venture Partners.  The money will go towards developing Six Degrees' sports-themed virtual world aimed at the 6-14 market, Action AllStars, which is now in private beta. Six Degrees was founded in 2006 by CEO Minard Hamilton and President Ben Jones, both senior executives at JAMDAT Mobile. Before that, Hamilton was a senior executive with ESPN and ESPN.com and Jones coordinated partnerships between game developers and publishers.

“Six Degrees Games is poised to offer the youth market a virtual sports world that surpasses current offerings,”  Will Kohler, Prism VentureWorks, said in a statement. “Prism’s LA presence has opened doors into new, high-value opportunities and Six Degrees Games is a great example of this. Minard, Ben and the Six Degrees Games team have worked with major participants in the world of sports, leagues and brands and understand how to build high-growth, successful companies.” 

Jim Armstrong, Managing Director, Clearstone, and Will Kohler, Principal, Prism VentureWorks, have joined the Six Degrees Games' Board of Directors.

In an interview with SoCal Tech, Hamilton says that the browser-based virtual world will focus on "all of the big sports" and support itself through subscriptions.

Also interesting to note, as the market gets more and more crowded, was his motivation for getting into virtual worlds as a way to reach the youth market. They're more direct than other online games.

"We were first thinking just online games," he told SoCal Tech. "Most people find you through big game portals, such as Yahoo, MSN, or AOL. Or, through big game aggregators, like Addicting, or Miniclip. Those are the intermediaries here. As we looked at the business model, we saw that those intermediaries take a pretty big chunk of revenue. Trying to think of the best ways to be positioned beneficially in that market, we came to the conclusion that you need to create a destination. That's the one way you can start to have leverage against the big intermediaries--if people are coming directly to you. The high risk, but most cost effective way to do this is to create a virtual world."

There's  still plenty of virtual worlds using the aggregators as a way to find audiences--even Habbo Hotel partnered with AddictingGames last summer--but they seem to typically bring users back to the world instead of leaving them on the aggregator's site.  With more virtual worlds adding their own casual games and partnering with established developers and publishers, it does make sense to look at them as destinations and then, to some degree, competitors with Miniclip.

Comments

[Matt]

Too bad they don't have invites!