MCI Management SA successfully closed its third investment in the Czech Republic. MCI committed to provide 1,15 million Euro in total to finance expansion of Czech community games company Geewa to other markets and growth of the current operations.
The aim of Geewa is to provide an online platform for multiplayer casual games. Geewa launched its platform in October 2005 in cooperation with Czech portal Atlas.cz which was shortly followed by other partners including the #1 Czech portal Seznam.cz (in cooperation with Seznam, Geewa operates the #1 web site in the Czech Republic in terms of average time spent), gaming portal of telecommunications company TelefĂłnica O2, and in 2007 Geewa also launched in Slovakia with TV MarkĂza.
âThe investment from MCI will enable us to fulfill out ambitious plans,â says MiloĹĄ Endrle, one of the founders and Managing Director of Geewa. âThat means mainly the expansion onto foreign markets and the development of new games which will follow up on the success of our flagship original title Word Soccer. Till the end of this year we plan to launch our platform and online games in Poland and Hungary with such similar strong partners as are Seznam and Atlas.cz in the Czech Republic and TV MarkĂza in Slovakia. Next year we want to enter large Western European markets such as Germany and the UK. At the same time we are preparing a new model for distribution of online multiplayer games which we want to use to attack the global Internet market.â
Currently, Geewa operates portals with a total number of unique visitors over 100,000 per day (with over 1,000,000 unique visitors per month) which play more than 500,000 matches per day. Average user plays 5 matches per day and spends 90 minutes on the portal. Geewaâs great strength is also its portfolio of 17 popular game titles including the most popular game on the Czech Internet, the original concept game Word Soccer.
âGeewaâs games are for everyone. They are simple but very entertaining fun games, often played by people over 30 years of age. Also, over 40% of our users are women,â says Michal NovĂĄk, the Head of Sales & Marketing of Geewa. âThis is an economically very interesting target group which was previously not addressed by community games. We generate a lot of new traffic for our partner portals which can be turned into a significant revenue stream from advertising and subscriptions. In particular, our platform generates a unique opportunity to present so called pre-roll video ads before each game. In this way Geewa is greatly helping the development of video advertising on the Internet.â
âCurrent trends in the Internet market, which are also referred to as Web 2.0, show us more focus on creating usersâ communities, users spending more time online, content generated by users themselves as well as comparing and competing between them, social networking. Geewa seems to be on a good track in the online gaming field, focusing heavily also on the community factor of online gaming.â says Ondrej Bartos, Investment Director CZ & SK of MCI Management S.A. âAnd we actually believe Geewa could be the first candidate for a GLT â Global Leader for Tomorrow in MCIâs portfolio,â concludes Ondrej Bartos.