12 Year Old Gets $6.5M for Gaming Company 180
Bayscribe writes "A Silicon Valley company co-founded by a 12-year-old has just raised $6.5 million in venture capital. PlaySpan, based in Santa Clara, Calif. says it offers game publishers a technology that lets users make payments and shop for other items. It calls itself the first "publisher-sponsored in-game commerce network." Arjun Mehta, a 6th grader, says on his Web site that he is passionate about software that can make the game experience more "rewarding," and that he started the company last year in his garage. He paid for it from earnings made from selling online game items he won."
Re:bubble 2.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope, those are the diapers these babies are still wearing.
Who invests money in 12 year olds? Who is so insane to do such a thing? Sure, 12 year olds can be bright, talented and even gifted, but I wouldn't trust a 12 year old with 6.5M $, nor his 11 year old vice-president of sales sister for that matter, to make correct business decisions.
I think it's time I try to sell this kid my 6.5M matchbox car. It's a classic collectors item, worth meeeeellions on ebay.
Re:The correct link.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I was around the same age during (first) the
What really doesn't make sense (Score:3, Interesting)
1) They support it fully, and thus facilitate it themselves like, say, Linden Labs. As such there's very little market for a secondary company, the operators already take care of things and they can offer things nobody else can, like security of transactions.
2) They hate it and it is a banable offence. Blizzard would be a great example. They are always combating gold sellers in World of Warcraft. Here there's a market for a secondary company, as the primary does what they can to prevent it.
Ok but you'll notice that all the ones out there like IGE seem to be located in non-US locations (IGE is in Hong Kong). Why is that? Well because not only do companies like Blizzard hate it, they'll sue your ass over it. Even if they don't win (and there's a reasonable chance they would, given it is their service and thus their right to set terms on it) they can drag your company down with a lawsuit and injunction over it.
However, that's only a problem for companies located in the US, or other nation that Blizzard (or rather their parent Vevendi SA) has offices and with legal systems friendly to such lawsuits. So operating in China is pretty safe, you just aren't going to get anywhere legally.
Well this company is US based. Seems rather stupid. Either you are trying to market in games that will let you, but don't need your services, or you are trying to market in games that won't let you, and will probably sue you if you become a big enough problem. Gee, THAT'S a great business plan.
Re:Where's the perpective? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's true of almost all of these situations. If it weren't for the parents and their connections, kids like this wouldn't even be introduced to such possibilities, much less given the resources for them, the encouragement regarding them or the expertise that would cost a normal kid/adult a lot of money and the connections that money can't buy.
This would be like a story about Bill Gates' child starting up his own software company as a teenager or Harrison Ford having a son who goes into acting. I mean... duh. What else was he going to do? He had the example and the resources to do it by dint of relation.
Not to mention... we don't know who really did the meat of the work. Remember that girl who did the abstract paintings and made like a half million dollars before it turned out that her dad (an artist) was the one who actually did all of the paintings that she was famous for?
Re:What really doesn't make sense (Score:4, Interesting)
The company seems to be aiming to sell their product / service to people who run MMORGs. I a few MMORGs start using it, then you could have interesting situations where people are trading objects in one world for ones in another. This could lead to inflation and exchange rate fluctuations between the two worlds much as you currently get between countries. I wonder what their plan is to counter this.
Re:Micropayments? (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember Quake? The game was okay, but like most Id games it was little more than a technology demo. The reason it was so popular was that it was easy for third parties to provide add-ons. At one point, my quake directory was about half a gigabyte, with less than a tenth of that content provided by Id. The most interesting thing about Quake, which was lost in later versions, was that the game rules, written in QuakeC, were compiled to a bytecode format, and so the compiled version worked on any CPU. Now picture a virtual world using the same model. The game publisher would sell a basic engine, with graphics, audio and network code, which would allow you to connect to a virtual environment. You'd then buy (or download for free) various third party extensions which would allow you to play in various parts of an online gamescape.
[1] If so, great work. I really enjoyed the first one. Any idea when a Mac port of the second one will be available? The Mac download link points to a corrupted disk image, so I can't even try an old version, and the FreeBSD box I played the first one on doesn't have a fast enough GPU to handle it.
Re:bubble 2.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
Games Company Wannabes (Score:2, Interesting)
They tell us how they have a great "idea" for a game. They want programmers to work for them; we ask what they will contribute, and it's "ideas". We tell them that it's like someone with no experience in car design saying they have a great idea for a car, and expecting a company to make it. Typically they want to make a complex game, and most popular of all, it's MMORPGs - so not only do you have the complexities of making a game, but also all the troubles of running a server.
Misleading articles such as this make me sad - promoting that ideas are important, and an idea is all it takes to get funding, and get into the business. No doubt this will encourage more people to post "I have great idea for a game, I wanna make a MMORPG".
I'm sure most of us had money-making ideas when we were 12. Some of us pulled it off when we were older, some of us didn't. But there's nothing special about ideas.
Re:bubble 2.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe someone that wants to lose 6.5M?
I love the end of the article "No word on when PlaySpan will be launching."
His entire company is a website describing a great idea and that's all it is. The software will never launch. Why would it? He has 6.5 million, technically owned by his parents because children don't really control anything unless they're emancipated, he can't even sign a contract.
If I was his parents I'd take the money and say "ok play time's over, here's a ps3, wii, xbox360 and new gaming PC, go have fun, mommy and daddy's going shopping". And what could the venture capitals do? Go to court and tell a judge "We gave 6.5 million to a 12 yr old for something that doesn't exist and we want it back!" Pretty sure the judge would say "You're retarded, go home, courts don't pay people for being stupid"
UPDATE: apparently his dad actually runs the company [venturebeat.com], the kid is just there as a gimmick and wasn't actually mentioned in the official press release [yahoo.com].