Successful re-launch of Swedish virtual world
After more than a year of development, Swedish game developer Friendbase AB has released a full update of the virtual world Friendbase. The new version is already showing good potential and the company is now looking to scale globally.
Swedish game developer Friendbase AB spent several years as a two-man band, bootstrapping development, building a solid following with thousands of members. In 2020 they took a strategic decision to build for scale, so after successfully fundraising $1M and a year of development, a whole new version of the virtual world Friendbase has now been released.
CEO Deborah Lygonis says; “We’d taken the old version technically as far as it could go so we decided to go all in and do a complete revamp and port to Unity, which has resulted in a fully flexible and scalable solution”.
The more flexible version enables content creation and campaigns to be released on-the-fly without having to update and upload new versions of the apps, and for global scaling it now comes with multilanguage support; this first version comes in four languages (English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish) but many more are already in the pipeline.
The improvements also include more graphic control for the user, like when creating and customizing your avatar and also when moving about.
Deborah continues; “With new content and features being uploaded almost every day and with our autumn roadmap crammed with fun games, quizzes, new rooms and other content, we are really excited for the coming year!”
About Friendbase to date:
Friendbase AB is an award-winning social platform company founded in 2013 based in Gothenburg Sweden, Istanbul Turkey, and Bengaluru India. Friendbase is a fun-packed chat world where young people from all over the world meet new friends, play games, and learn. Friendbase mission is to create ecosystem for responsible gaming and learning. They aim to become the global platform for young teenagers all over the world.
The new version of Friendbase builds upon the success of the beta version that has members all across the globe, half of the user base comes from Brazil, India, US, UK, Philippines and Turkey. Friendbase is well set to be part of high growth markets and at the same time having a foothold in the more mature US market. To further capitalize on the growth in India, a joint venture has been established to have feet on the ground, Friendbase India Private Ltd (registered in Bengaluru Oct 2021).
Friendbase had 770 000 registered accounts reaching 85 000 MAU during the active beta version running for 18 months. The main user groups are teens in the age range 13–16. However, we see that in same Asian markets our user base is up to 20 years of age. Members divided 60/40 between female/male.
For more information please contact:
Deborah B Lygonis, CEO deborah.lygonis@friendbase.com
Melika Sanati, CMO, Melika.sanati@friendbase.com
Suneel Sharma, General Partner India, suneel.sharma@friendbase.com
