I Got Games is Launching a New One on Facebook: FishIsle
I Got Games has gained 15 million registered users in the last four years through porting Chinese massive multiplayer online games to the rest of the world — its audience loosely parallels Facebook’s, with a third of its users in North America, a third in Europe, and the rest in Latin American and Southeast Asia. And now, having already successfully launched original MMOs, it’s starting to make social games.

The company will launch a new Facebook app this coming weekend called FishIsle. The game will combine the virtual aquarium-caring features of games like Happy Aquarium and My Fishbowl with the more goal-oriented structure of virtual farming games like FarmVille, says Mark Zhang, vice president of operations at IGG’s local office in Santa Clara, Calif.
In the game, players travel across a virtual ocean in fishing boats, nurturing virtual aquatic farms of salmon, flounder, shrimp, jelly fish and other types of underwater life, harvesting each when they’re read. Players can also purchase different types of fishing boats, and decorate their own islands with buildings and other features. The interface shows the game from a 45-degree, birds-eye angle, to add to the feeling of being in an alternate virtual world. The company also plans to roll out more MMO-style features.

The virtual store and some other parts of the interface, in the finest of social gaming tradition, look quite similar to other hits (like FarmVille).
As IGG has done with its MMOs, and as other social games are doing on Facebook, FishIsle will be free to play, and will make money from selling virtual goods.
IGG has twelve studios in China, although it is based on the Cayman Islands, and also plans to roll out 18 more traditional MMOs. FishIsle is its initial move into social gaming, as the company has 7 more social titles planned — also, it built this game in 3 months, Zhang tells us, so expect these other games pretty soon.

To get this first game off the ground, so to speak, the company also plans to cross-promote it within some of its existing MMOs, on its home site and within partner MMO games in the US. Eventually, the company may also look at buying Facebook ads to promote games. It already has 14 successful MMOs, and says it is bringing in “multiple millions” in revenue, with 85% of the money coming from North America and the United Kingdom.
It has raised two rounds of funding totaling $15 million from IDG, Hearst Interactive, and Vertex Venture Holdings (a venture arm of the Singapore government).
[Screenshots via Blend Games]



November 11th, 2009 at 11:33 am
[...] if you’re a regular reader, you’ve watched more and more of these sorts of games launch or get revealed in the last couple of months. Now, it’s time for a closer look at the biggest [...]
November 30th, 2009 at 7:47 am
[...] after only launching a few weeks ago. The high-quality fish-farming game is only a month old, and an early foray by a massive multiplayer online gaming developer into social gaming. This app, and it’s developer, are off to a very solid [...]
November 30th, 2009 at 7:51 am
[...] after only launching a few weeks ago. The high-quality fish-farming game is only a month old, and an early foray by a massive multiplayer online gaming developer into social gaming. This app, and it’s developer, are off to a very solid [...]
December 9th, 2009 at 6:42 am
[...] I Got Games, специализирующаяся на ММО-играх, сделала первый социальный проект — Fish Isle, Country Story про [...]
December 9th, 2009 at 7:30 am
[...] I Got Games, специализирующаяся на ММО-играх, сделала первый социальный проект — Fish Isle (Facebook, AppData), Country [...]
May 13th, 2010 at 8:15 am
[...] developed and published free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing games. But it began experimenting with social games on Facebook late last year, and now it has four new ones coming out: Crazy Clinic, Perfect Poker Live, Crazy [...]
May 14th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
[...] – the developer-publisher first experimented with Facebook back in October of last year with FishIsle. Now, IGG seeks to improve on past titles with these new releases. To see how they did, we took a [...]
June 7th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Having trouble launching the game on facebook.
January 4th, 2012 at 4:37 pm
i have been trying to plat fishisle for the past week and i am not able to get it anywhere.. i want to kno why.. u say it is a facebook game and it does nothing when i go to play it.. i used to play it all the time and i want it.. please get back to me asap……
April 5th, 2012 at 2:40 pm
[...] Hearst Interactive’s investments in casual games site VoxPop and China’s I Got Games (per ISG), for example — as he says that online publishers want to see the virtual goods model pay off [...]