2008 Brought $500 million in Fundings for Game Companies

2008 proved to be a very productive year for game producers as they managed to collect more than $500 million in funds, VentureBeat reports. It’s true that the economic crisis which many of the countries experience dramatically will mean the collapse for many of these games but as long as there are such fundings, there’s still hope. Although $500 million is less impressive when put next to the approximately $5 billion cleantech is accountable for, this was definitely one of the most successful years for venture investment in video game companies.

Here’s a list of first ten such game companies (you can read the rest of them on VentureBeat):

1. BigFish Games — $83 million for casual downloadable games

2. Trion World Network — $70 million for online multiplayer server games. (The company is working with the Sci-Fi channel on an episodic online game that ties into a TV show and has other titles in the works too.)

3. Real Time Worlds — $50 million for online games such as All Points Bulletin

4. Turbine, maker of the Lord of the Rings Online — $40 million for massively multiplayer online games

5. G10 online game company — $38 million from China’s The9

6. Zynga — $29 million for social games

7. Playfish — $17 million for social games

8. GameDuell — $17 million for skill-based games

9. Playspan — $16.8 million for virtual goods platform

10. Nurien Software — $15 million for fashion-oriented social online game