Investors are excited about GameSalad because of the end to end game platform that the company has created. Since then, the company has gone on to raise $7.1 million in venture funding from some of the biggest names in the business, including Greycroft Partners, DFJ Mercury, ff Venture Capital, and Steamboat Ventures. What he noticed was he had come up with a tool that was accessible to non-programmers and helped democratize game development by making it useful to users that don’t have a computer science background. Michael Agustin began thinking about a tool set that extracted the most common features in a game and figured if he could abstract those features into an easy-to-use tool set, it would help studios develop games quickly. The initial concept was to develop tools for “rapid prototyping” in the gaming industry. The company now has studios in Austin and Los Angeles. That summer Gendai Games joined the Austin Technology Incubator before changing the name of the company to GameSalad in 2010. Founded in 2007 by Michael Agustin, Tan Tran, Joshua Seaver, and Dan Treiman, the company released its first open beta of the GameSalad Game Creator product as Gendai Games, Inc. The San Francisco-based GameSalad provides a platform used by creators to rapidly design, publish and distribute original cross platform games. Now, a company called GameSalad wants to turn everyone into a game designer, no coding required. The company, which received over $6 million in venture capital earlier this year, boasts 170,000 users across the free and professional versions of its game creation tool, which doesn't require any programming knowledge to use.Thanks to the explosion of mobile and social media games like Angry Birds and Farmville in the past five years, everyone is a gamer. GameSalad doesn't currently offer any built-in monetization options for HTML5 developers, but Agustin said he sees the web games as "the best way for players to learn about and experience mobile games before downloading them." "That said, HTML5 has less friction because the content is delivered as you browse the Web, and there is no download or content to install." "The App Store and the Android Marketplace still serve as the primary discovery model on mobile devices, where native apps often can provide a better overall experience," Agustin said. While HTML5 web apps are playable natively on many mobile browsers, Agustin said he doesn't see the option primarily as a way to do an end-run around the certification requirements and fees associated with mobile app stores. With most major web browsers now supporting HTML5's options for heavily interactive web apps, Agustin says the option gives a game a much bigger potential audience than plugins like Flash or Unity, and the company is helping promote many of those games through the GameSalad Arcade section of its web site. "We’re placing a bet: GameSalad wants to be ahead of the curve with HTML5-it’s widely expected to become the next standard language for the web, and is poised to quickly disrupt Flash." "I’m not here to say that Flash is done, but we do envision that the web game industry will move towards the open standard of HTML5," Agustin said. The move, which comes on top of existing GameSalad support for iOS and Mac desktop publishing, is reflective of a greater trend towards open standards in web game publishing, GameSalad Chief Product Officer Michael Agustin tells Gamasutra. GameSalad announced today that users of its drag-and-drop game creation engine can now publish titles that work with the HTML5 standard, and embed those titles for play on any compatible web browser.
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