NaturalMotion Raises $11 Million Led By Benchmark For High End Mobile Games
Torsten Reil
While many believe that mobile gaming is the future of the gaming industry, the graphics and overall experience of many mobile games still do not match up to desktop or console games.
Startup NaturalMotion wants to change that with its games that have photo-realistic, 3-D style graphics. The company’s technology is based on Natural Motion CEO Torsten Reil’s Oxford University Ph.D. research on simulating the movements of humans and animals. NaturalMotion’s parent company started out providing high-end technology for top console games such as Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne. Based on that success, the company started building its own mobile social games.
“We released a series of games that shared the same principles: ultra high-end graphics quality paired with the usage pattern that’s much more applicable for mobile devices,” Reil says.
NaturalMotion has published six games, which have all reached the top ten on the Apple App Store. Its most popular title is My Horse, a free-to-play game where players take care of and train a horse for competitions. The horse in the app looks remarkably realistic. The company plans to make all future games free with virtual goods payments. At the recent WWDC keynote, NaturalMotion’s upcoming multi-player game CSR Racing was previewed on stage.
The 130 person company, which previously raised $8 million from Balderton Capital, has offices in Oxford and London and is now opening an office in San Francisco.
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