Wooga is a mobile-first game developer in Berlin, Germany. The company develops free-to-play mobile and social games for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets and social networks like Facebook. It is the world's 5th-biggest game developer on the Facebook platform as of March 2014. The game's name comes from the words World of Gaming.
History
Wooga was founded in January 2009 by Jens Begemann, Patrick Paulisch and Philipp Moeser. Patrick Paulisch has since left Wooga. In July 2009, Wooga launched its first game, Brain Buddies. The game reached 5 million monthly players 3 months after launch. The company received €5 million in a round of funding led by Balderton Capital in November 2009. Holtzbrinck Ventures, which had provided funding earlier that year, also participated in this round. In February 2010, Wooga launched its second game, Bubble Island, which reached 4 million monthly players in 8 weeks. In May 2010, Wooga launched its third game, Monster World Wooga announced in July 2016 that Monster World would be shut down on August 31 after 6 years due to a decline in the number of players. In November 2010, Wooga launched Happy Hospital. Wooga.com, Games-Page In March 2011, Wooga launched Diamond Dash, released in December for iPhone and iPad on the iOS App Store. In March 2012, Wooga announced that Diamond Dash had been downloaded over 11 million times since launch. Wooga raised a Series B Round of $24 m funding in May 2011. Magic Land Island was launched during the GDC Europe in August 2011 in Cologne. In June 2012 the HTML5 game was open sourced under the name Pocket Island on GitHub under MIT license and with the assets under Creative Commons licenseCC BY-NC-SA. In March 2013 Wooga launched both Monster World mobile for iOS and Pearl’s Peril. Pearl’s Peril became the company’s fastest selling game. On 10 April 2013 Wooga launched Pocket Village. In May, they launched Fantastic Forest and Kingsbridge on the 21st and the 28th, respectively. In February 2014Fantastic Forest was relaunched as Farm Tales. On 22 August 2013 Jelly Splash launched on iOS. The game was subsequently released on the Facebook.com platform in September 2013, and on Android in October 2013. Wooga also launched Jelly Splash as a test title for the Korean KakaoTalk platform on 9 November 2013. In December 2013, Jelly Splash reported monthly active users of 8.2 million. At the GDC 2014, CEO Jens Begemann presented the company’s new development approach, which he calls the “hit filter”. The focus of this new approach is to create two hits per year. On 20 May 2015, Wooga launched Crazy Kings. On 6 October 2016, Wooga launched Bubble Island 2. As of July 2018, the company employs 200 people. In December 2018, Wooga was acquired for more than 200 million US-Dollars by Israeli gaming companyPlaytika.
