Lolapps Merges With Social Game Publisher 6waves

Social game developer Lolapps and publisher 6waves have announced that the two companies have merged, and will now be known as 6waves Lolapps, a company focused on game development and publishing simultaneously. The Hong Kong-based 6waves previously published Lolapp's Ravenwood Fair, and Lolapps CEO Arjun Sethi told Gamasutra that with this new partnership, 6waves will provide Lolapps with more direct access to "distribution and access to more development capabilities," enabling Lolapps to release its social games on platforms beyond Facebook and even on mobile devices. In addition to helping Lolapps' games expand to other platforms, 6waves will use Lolapps' products to attract new publishing partners and strengthen its presence on a range of social networks. In particular, 6waves will use Lolapps' recently acquired Fliso engine to attract publishing partners, using Ravenwood Fair as the engine's showcase title. "We will leverage some of [Lolapps'] stuff like their analytics platform and the Fliso engine, which we feel will be like an equalizer that will help third part developers get on the platform very quickly, and will facilitate very fast and easy development," said 6waves CEO Rex Ng. Sethi added that Lolapps will develop and work on the Fliso engine as before, and 6waves will promote the engine and provide it to any developers within its network. Ng said that with Lolapps' games at its disposal, 6waves will be able to launch internally-developed titles and establish a strong foothold on Asian-focused social networks like Mixi and Hangame. "Now that Lolapps is part of our team, we have a good pipeline for launching games in a global fashion," he explained. Sethi said that the two companies have shared a similar vision for growth since working together on Ravenwood Fair, which helped inspire the original idea for the merger. "We had the same strategy and the same alignment regarding where we wanted to go -- part of that was international, and other part was mobile growth, etcetera," he said. "It began to make sense for us to start working together, especially because we were working together from a partnership perspective." He noted that expanding into publishing was "always part of [Lolapp's] mindset." To achieve this goal, Lolapps chose to join with 6waves, an established publisher, so it could expand its business while still remaining focused on game development. "6waves wasn't focused on development; they were focused on publishing and making sure that it worked. For us, we get to think less about it and still get to execute on that vision, as 6waves continues to do that for us," Sethi continued. With this new partnership, Sethi will now report to 6waves' Ng, though he said that the companies will remain largely independent, with 6waves primarily interacting with Lolapps to promote and distribute its games and tech. The executives noted that in the wake of the merger, the companies will retain all of their current employees, and continue to operate from separate offices across the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, and the UK.