Playfish raises a further $17 million

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Kudos to Kristian Segerstrale and the team at Playfish. Playfish has just secured $17 million in funding from Accel Partners and Index Ventures. This takes the total that the team has raised to $21 million.

I have blogged before that Playfish is a great company that really gets the social/browser-based gaming space and is making the absolutely-right decision (in my opinion, of course) to eschew building its own destination website in favour of using the heavily-trafficked social networks for its users and infrastructure. This allows Playfish to focus on building great social games, not SEO and PPC campaigns to drive traffic to its own website.

Playfish’s other great strength is its relationship with Google. I don’t think that it is any coincidence that Google chose to showcase Playfish’s games when it announced the launch of its Adsense for Games service earlier this month. This relationship, and the smart way in which Playfish has incorporated “A word from our sponsors” into its games, suggests that Playfish is well on the way to finding a sustainable business model for casual social games. And TechCrunch speculated that Playfish was the $1m monthly revenue Facebook application developer that everyone was talking about.

So congratulations to the team and lets hope that they keep on delivering, because in the long run, proving that social casual games have a meaningful revenue stream will be good for the entire industry.

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