据venturebeat报道，iPhone手机游戏发行商TinyCo公司于日前获得了互联网先驱马克·安德森（Marc Andreessen）的1800万美元投资。

安德森是美国网景公司联合创始人之一，他是Hewlett-Packard、eBay和Facebook的董事会成员，现在还将加入了TinyCo董事会。从他对TinyCo的支持力度中可以看出，iPhone以及iPad等移动设备的发展，已经让手机游戏成为一个热门领域。尽管Facebook社交游戏已经形成一个巨大的市场，但还有许多观察者认为，手机游戏领域的发展潜力更大，这也正是许多投资者争相涌入这一行的原因所在。

Tap Resort Party

据游戏邦了解，TinyCo这家小型发行公司由Ian Spivey和Suleman Ali联合创办，这两年在麻省理工学院就学的时候就开始认识了，目前都还未满30岁。

著名的手机及社交游戏开发商Digital Chocolate在本周初也融资了1200万美元，Pocket Games在去年12月获得了红杉资本的500万美元投资，可以看出，自从去年日本DeNA以4.03亿美元收购Ngmoco公司后，手机游戏领域正成为一片投资热土。游戏邦获悉，2010年游戏公司总共融资10.5亿美元，比2009年增长了58%。

Spivey表示， “我们认为这个市场在未来12至24个月中会诞生一个价值十亿美元的公司。”

这并不是一个超前的预言，当Zynga旗下的《Mafia Wars》在一个月中实现了100万美元营收时，人们已经大为吃惊，但是现在，拥有9300万月活跃用户的《CityVille》所创造的营收已远远超过了《Mafia Wars》的成就。

Spivey预测苹果今年将售出5000万部的iPhone和iPad，而Android设备销量更将达到1亿部。这个市场规模的不断扩大，将有利于推动TinyCo游戏业务的发展。

据游戏邦了解，TiyCo数年前曾是一家Facebook应用公司，但在七个月之前因iPad的问世以及Android智能手机的快速发展，其创始人决定转战手机游戏领域。在此之前，该公司仅有6名成员，但现在已成长为一个拥有40名员工的企业，目前正招聘来自Playdom、EA、微软、亚马逊、PlayFirst、Digital Chocolate等游戏公司的成员。

经过对市场进行研究后，Spivey和Ali发现在模拟类及管理类游戏在其他平台上非常受欢迎，但在智能手机平台上却还不够普及，所以他们决定从这一方面入手。游戏邦获悉，该公司目前有两款热门游戏就属于这种类型，即景

区模拟游戏《Tap Resort Party》和饭店管理游戏《Tiny Chef》，这两者目前下载量共超过1000万次，也为该公司带来了丰厚的利润（游戏邦注：据Inside Social Games报道，该公司估值已达1亿美元）。该公司还计划在今年推出十款游戏。

对于目前拥有50884款游戏应用的苹果App Store来说，TinyCo的进入这一领域确实是个好消息，而TinyCo也可以由此获得与EA等公司平起平坐的机会，让旗下游戏成为热卖产品。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Mobile game maker TinyCo scores $18M from Andreessen Horowitz

When uber-investor Marc Andreessen moves into a market, you have to figure it’s hot. Today, his firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $18 million in TinyCo, an iPhone-game publisher.

Andreessen, you may recall, cofounded Netscape, the creator of the first commercially successful Web browser. So take his word for it: Mobile gaming is hot, thanks to the popularity of smartphones such as the iPhone and tablet computers such as the iPad. While  social games on Facebook have become a huge market in just a few years, many observers think that mobile gaming will be even bigger.

That’s why there’s a gold rush on now by investors.

The $18 million figure is a pretty big amount for a young company such as TinyCo. TinyCo was founded by Ian Spivey and Suleman Ali, two serial entrepreneurs in their late 20s who met while they were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Digital Chocolate, an established maker of cell phone and social games, raised $12 million earlier this week. Pocket Games raised $5 million from Sequoia Capital in December. And everyone is

bullish on the mobile game market ever since Japan’s DeNA bought iPhone game maker Ngmoco for up to $403 million last year. Overall, game companies raised $1.05 billion in 2010, up 58 percent from a year earlier.

“We think that a billion-dollar company will be created in this market in the next 12 to 24 months,” Spivey said.

That’s not an insane statement. People were stunned early on when Zynga’s Mafia Wars started making $1 million in revenues a month. Now CityVille, which has 93 million monthly active users, is making far more than Mafia Wars ever did. This year, Spivey is expecting Apple to sell 50 million iPhones and iPads, while Android device sales may top 100 million. That will create a bigger and bigger market for TinyCo’s games.

One measure of how important the game market has become is that Andreessen himself, who serves on the boards of Hewlett-Packard, eBay, and Facebook, is joining TinyCo’s board.

TinyCo started as a Facebook-app company a couple of years ago. But the founders decided to switch to mobile games about seven months ago with the arrival of the iPad and the wave of growth in Android smartphones, Spivey said in an interview.

At that time, they had around six people; they have now grown to 40. TinyCo has been hiring veterans from companies such as Playdom, EA, Microsoft, Amazon, PlayFirst, Digital Chocolate and others.

The change in direction turned out to be a good move. Both Spivey and Ali studied the market and figured out that two categories that were hits on other platforms — simulations and management games — were underrepresented on smartphones. So they set about building them and two of the company’s three games have been huge hits. Together, Tap Resort Party (above, a resort simulation game) and Tiny Chef (top, a restaurant management game) have more than 10 million downloads between them. Those games were successful enough to make the company profitable. Now it is undergoing an expansion and hopes to launch 10 games this year.

That’s the great thing about the App Store, which has 50,884 games. Titles from small concerns such as TinyCo can sit alongside games from Electronic Arts on the list of top sellers. On the Internet, no one knows you’re tiny.（source:venturebeat）