MZ (company)

MZ
Formerly called
  • Addmired (2008 (2008)–2012 (2012))[1]
  • Machine Zone (2012–)
Private
Industry
Founded 2008 (2008)
Founder
  • Gabriel Leydon
  • Halbert Nakagawa
  • Mike Sherrill
Headquarters Palo Alto, California, United States
Area served
 Worldwide
Products
Number of employees
 550 (as of October 2015)[3]
Divisions Platform[4][5]
Subsidiaries Epic War LLC[2]
Website mz.com

Machine Zone, Inc. (MZ) is a privately held technology company, founded in 2008 and based in Palo Alto, California. The company is best known for its widely advertised freemium mobile MMO strategy games Game of War: Fire Age and Mobile Strike,[4] which have both simultaneously been ranked among the top ten highest-grossing mobile games.[6]

Business history

Origin and founding

The company, which was originally called Addmired, was founded in 2008. In 2012, Addmired changed its name to Machine Zone, after raising $8 million in funding from Menlo Ventures.[7] The company rebranded itself as MZ in 2016.[8]

Gabriel Leydon, currently the CEO, founded the company with partners Mike Sherrill and current Chief Technology Officer Halbert Nakagawa.[7][9] It was among the participants in Y Combinator's Winter 2008 Accelerator program for startups.[10]

Products

The company got its start making AddHer and AddHim,[10] a pair of MySpace widgets that TechCrunch called "a Hot or Not-esque social network plugin."[11] Addmired later pivoted into the free-to-play game space, releasing 13 games between 2009 and 2012, including the iOS games Original Gangstaz, iMob and iMob 2, and Global War Riot.[7][11][12]

Machine Zone released Game of War: Fire Age in July 2013. According to VentureBeat, Leydon had used the 2012 venture funding to "bet everything on Game of War," putting a team of 80 people on an 18-month project to design and build a complex real-time strategy game, including creation of a messaging infrastructure and language translation layer that would allow worldwide participation in the game's alliances and chat.[3]

The company launched Mobile Strike, a modern warfare game, in November 2015.[2] In an advertising campaign that featured Arnold Schwarzenegger, the game was marketed as a product of a company called Epic War, later revealed to be a development studio of Machine Zone.[2]

In April 2016, simultaneously with rebranding itself as MZ,[8] the company announced the launch of a new platform as a service, leveraging the cloud-based networking infrastructure of its real-time gaming platform.[13][14] Using the existing technology developed to monitor hundreds of thousands of players in its real-time mobile games, the company developed and demonstrated a system for the government of New Zealand that included applications to view and manage public transportation more efficiently, including an ability "to see where every bus and train is down to the second."[15]

Marketing

Kate Upton in 2014, promoting Game of War in costume as Athena.

Approximately $40 million was spent on marketing Game of War: Fire Age in 2014.[16] Along with advertisements in digital and social media, television commercials were produced featuring model Kate Upton as the goddess Athena. The ads highlighted Upton's sex appeal as she led battles in fantasy settings that were compared to those in Game of Thrones.[17] The spots were introduced in the United States during an NFL Thursday Night Football game and were aired prominently during Super Bowl games and other sports events.[17][18]

Singer Mariah Carey replaced Upton, in late 2015, as the face of the game's advertising campaign.[19] In September 2015, the first commercial featuring a brief clip of Carey as Athena was previewed by TMZ.[20] Carey's agreement reportedly included "a seven-figure pay check; a 30-second commercial filmed by Alan Taylor ... and the use of her music in future promotional material."[19]

In February 2016, MZ spent an estimated three times more on television advertising than any other mobile gaming company, including spending an estimated $10.7 million on 3,265 airings of its Super Bowl 50 ad for Mobile Strike featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger.[21]

Game revenue and player purchases

In August 2015, a former employee of Machine Zone was arrested and charged with stealing proprietary data that included "player spending habits broken down by time, location, age and other characteristics" which showed, for example, "which in-game items generate the most revenue and where in the game players often quit."[22] The monetary value of the data was linked by the Wall Street Journal to the fact that "about 3% of mobile-game players buy virtual goodies, such as extra turns and special powers. Most spend only a few dollars a month, while a tiny fraction known as whales – a name derived from casinos – plunk down $50 or more a month."[22]

Analytics by Slice Intelligence indicated that Game of War's paying players each spent an average of $550 in 2015 on its in-app purchases, compared to $87 spent by the average player of mobile free-to-play games.[23][24]

References

  1. ↑ Macmillan, Douglas; Demos, Telis (July 16, 2014). "Newest Hit-Game Maker Machine Zone Nears $3 Billion Valuation". Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 2016-04-03.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Takahashi, Dean (November 11, 2015). "Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in Machine Zone's modern warfare game Mobile Strike (updated)". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on 2015-11-13.
  3. 1 2 Takahashi, Dean (October 16, 2015). "An interview with Gabe Leydon, Machine Zone's man on the Iron Throne". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on 2015-11-20.
  4. 1 2 Jordan, Jon (April 5, 2016). "Updated: Machine Zone spins out big data tech RTplatform as separate division". Pocket Gamer. Archived from the original on 2016-04-08.
  5. ↑ Rubenstein Associates; MZ (May 11, 2016). "MZ Appoints Nasi Jazayeri President of Platform" (Press release). Palo Alto, Calif.: Business Wire. Retrieved 2016-05-27.
  6. ↑ "Top Grossing All Devices – Games: All Countries". Think Gaming. April 8, 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-04-08.
  7. 1 2 3 De Vere, Kathleen (March 27, 2012). "Addmired nets $8 million Series B, changes name to Machine Zone". Social Times. AdWeek. Archived from the original on 2016-04-04.
  8. 1 2 Rubenstein Associates; MZ (April 4, 2016). "Machine Zone Rebrands as MZ and Launches Standalone Tech Platform" (Press release). Palo Alto, Calif.: Business Wire. Retrieved 2016-05-26.
  9. ↑ Kolker, Robert (March 5, 2015). "One Nerd to Rule Them All". Bloomberg Businessweek. Archived from the original on 2016-03-25.
  10. 1 2 Hendrickson, Mark (March 14, 2008). "Y Combinator Demo Day Roundup for Spring 2008". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2016-03-17.
  11. 1 2 Velazco, Chris (March 27, 2012). "Freemium Game Dev Addmired Rebrands As Machine Zone, Lands $8M From Menlo Ventures". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2016-03-22.
  12. ↑ "Machine Zone". CrunchBase. TechCrunch. 2013. Archived from the original on 2013-05-09.
  13. ↑ Takahashi, Dean (April 9, 2016). "CEO Gabe Leydon on why Machine Zone renamed itself and launched its real-time cloud platform". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on 2016-04-12.
  14. ↑ Marshall, Matt (April 4, 2016). "Machine Zone launches cloud platform to process millions of real-time interactions". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on 2016-04-06.
  15. ↑ DiChristopher, Tom (May 26, 2016). "Machine Zone is using video game tech to make your city's buses run better". CNBC. Archived from the original on 2016-05-26.
  16. ↑ Tassi, Paul (November 14, 2014). "A $40M Ad Budget Buys 'Game of War: Fire Age' Kate Upton". Forbes. Retrieved 2015-02-20.
  17. 1 2 Trinh, Brian Vinh Tien (February 1, 2015). "Game of War's Super Bowl Ad Is Pretty Much Kate Upton In 'Game of Thrones'". The Huffington Post Canada. Retrieved 2015-02-20.
  18. ↑ Monllos, Kristina (November 13, 2014). "Game of War: Fire Age Launches First Global Campaign, Starring Kate Upton". Adweek. Retrieved 2015-02-20.
  19. 1 2 Cox, Jamieson. "Mariah Carey is replacing Kate Upton as the new public face of Game of War: Fire Age". The Verge. Retrieved 2015-06-13.
  20. ↑ "Game of War with Mariah Carey". TMZ. September 14, 2015.
  21. ↑ Servideo, Zach (March 5, 2016). "Machine Zone's Mobile Strike tops Far Cry: Primal in Super Bowl month ad spending". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on 2016-04-06.
  22. 1 2 Needleman, Sarah E. (August 26, 2015). "Why 'Game of War' User Data Is So Valuable". Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 2015-12-25.
  23. ↑ Grubb, Jeff (April 1, 2016). "Game of War's paying players spent an average of $550 on its in-app purchases in 2015". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on 2016-05-06.
  24. ↑ Stanton, Taylor (March 31, 2016). "Hardly pocket change: mobile gamers spend an average of $87 dollars on in-app purchases". Slice Intelligence. Archived from the original on 2016-03-31.
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