Ludei raises $1.5 million to accelerate its HTML5 vision

[rich]

Maybe now they can afford to fix the bugs in CocoonJS?

 

"HTML5 is alive and kicking.

That's the message from US/Spanish outfit Ludei, which has just closed a $1.5 million early stage funding round.

Spanish venture capitalists Kibo Ventures and Vitamina K, as well as several angel investors, were involved.

Ludei says it will use the money to expand its JavaScript/HTML5 engineering team to meet the growing demand from game and app developers.

This brings the total investment the company has raised to-date to $4.5 million.

In your hands

Its smarts are already being used by over 6,000 developers, including what it labels 'three of the top 20 game publishers in the world'."

 

http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG%2EBiz/Ludei+news/news.asp?c=51901

[Mat Groves]

can we haz webGL working in it pleaz

[Gio]

This is very good news and I like what Ludei are doing. However I don't really understand why a lot of people are eager to invest so much in it... while it's great right now, surely it's just a matter of a few years until our games will be fast enough in mobile browsers, with fullscreen support and whatnot?

 

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking.

[Ryguy]

Perhaps the investors aren't thinking in those terms. Apps are where it's at right now. I'm not complaining, though. The better CJS is, the happier I'll be.

[PaulR]

Probably they are thinking about how people discover and get games.  Many people have been trained to go to the android/ios stores to get their gaming fix and that will take a long time to change. So having an easy route to getting your game on these is something people will pay for (their tech is only free for a limited time).

 

Also look at how steam has gained prominence over just going online and downloading that indie game. 

[Gio]

I agree on that point. But still, in an ideal future where mobiles are fast enough, we shouldn't need anything as elaborate as CocoonJs that does special hardware-acceleration tricks.

 

Hopefully we won't need anything like PhoneGap either, as more of the mobile API's for accelerometers etc, become more available in all browsers.

 

I think we'll only need a plain web view wrapper for web games and apps. A bit optimistic I know, but I suppose it's going to happen at some point. Which is probably what Mozilla are thinking with their Firefox OS too.

[PaulR]

It is true it sure would be nice to be able to use a simple wrapper to get games on to the market places rather than needing something specialized. From that point of view, as you mentioned, Ludei is sort of betting that does not happen anytime soon.

[shanatron]

I really hope they improve Cocoonjs, it's the best solution I've used to get my games on the app stores.

[dTb]

To continue the discussion around the wrappers, one thing I like with the canvas accelerating ones (means not Cordova) is the fact that you don't need to be afraid of breaking changes when OS are releasing new versions : even if the browser's html/canvas/css/js implementation change, your game is compiled and interpreted by the app, not the browser. You don't need to spend hours fixing your games just because Apple decided that a certain command or a certain trick will not be available anymore..

 

In a sense I'm agree with Gio : devices will become more and more powerful and the need of acceleration will go down, but this robustness against OS updates will still be a strong point for wrappers I think.

 

The sad thing is it concern only canvas applications for the moment, I don't think there is any wrapper implementing his own version of webkit (or any other DOM render) yet, they are all just using the device's webviews.

 

Of course this concerns only people who can afford (or want) to go fight to live on the stores ;o)