CrowdStar hopes to strike mobile gold again with $10M StarFund

Since hitting the on the iOS App Store with Top Girl, CrowdStar looks like its hungry for another hit in the mobile games space. Well, another 40 hits, to be exact. The social game developer recently launched StarFund, a $10 million fund that the company will use to back independent mobile game developers, $250 thousand at a time, Mobile Entertainment reports.

StarFund has been made possible in part by YouWeb, the developer's original incubator, or a company that oversees a start up's first stages of life to ensure its survival with funding and other resources. Apparently, YouWeb has deep pockets, and is ready to lighten them on the burgeoning mobile games scene. And that's quite alright by CrowdStar.

"What we know is that great teams and products can still get to the top in mobile social gaming," CrowdStar head of mobile Blair Hamilton said. "With StarFund, we are looking to fund the next stars in mobile social games."

CrowdStar StarFund
Who knows, with 40 more mobile games slated to release with the help of CrowdStar and YouWeb, perhaps one of them will finally knock Angry Birds off of its feathery throne. Better yet, maybe this will help the It Girl creator to become a worthy opponent for Zynga and EA on the iPhone.

Do you think CrowdStar has a chance against the competition with its StarFund? What other types of games do you hope to see come from the company aside from It Girl and Top Girl?

FIFA Superstars on iPhone yanked from App Store due to 'server issues'

EA is sitting pretty on Facebook at the moment, but on smartphones ... not so much. Mobile Entertainment reports that that the publisher has been forced to remove its recently-released iPhone version of Facebook soccer (football) hit FIFA Superstars from the App Store due to "server issues."

The game, released in late August, provides the 2.8 million monthly players of the Facebook version of FIFA Superstars a near-identical representation of what they're used to seeing in their browsers. However, the game suffered login issues from the get-go, it seems. Players have been unable to access the game after logging into the company's new Origin service.

"We are currently experiencing server issues with FIFA Superstars mobile that have required us to temporarily take the game down," EA told Mobile Entertainment. "This is not a data security-related issue. We are implementing a solution that will ensure users have the best gameplay experience, and will provide an update soon as to when the game will be live again."

According to Mobile Entertainment, EA stresses that this issue does not affect the Facebook version of the game, and that players can still enjoy the game there for now. (When we tried to log into the game, we didn't encounter any issues either.) It's comforting to see that EA is more vocal with the issues it has encountered in this game than it has been with social games in the past.

When its hyper popular Facebook version of The Sims, The Sims Social, suffered launch issues, the company was mum on the details for days before it released a message to its players with an explanation (and later threw them a bone). Since then, the game has enjoyed incredible growth, so hopefully FIFA Superstars for iPhone can bounce back from these hiccups just as well.

[Via Pocket Gamer]

Did you have trouble logging into FIFA Superstars for iPhone, too? What are you doing to scratch the social soccer itch while you wait for the game to return to the App Store? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment