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Doug Levin still sits on the board at Black Duck Software, the company he founded in 2002. But lately he’s been spending most of his time playing video games.
"I've been working seven-day weeks," Levin said of his work on Ayeah Games Inc., a Boston social games startup he has founded, where he is developing a social game that will incorporate news-related and celebrity-related comments and sharing on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Levin has outsourced development of the game to Disruptor Beam, the Facebook game development studio co-founded by former GamerDNA co-founders Jon Radoff and Angela Bull. Investors in a seed round the startup has raised, which Levin declined to quantify, include angel investor and former Lotus CTO John Landry and former Sun Microsystems executive Janpieter Scheerder, who invested through Eureeka Ventures, a California angel and advisor network.
“We will pioneer a new category called social reality,” Levin said, which mixes players’ social graph with real-time events. Players will be rewarded with points and leader-board status for the timeliness and influence of their tweets and Facebook posts, tied to specific events, issues and personalities. The company proposes to earn the bulk of its revenue from sales of virtual goods.
Like his investors, Levin has an enterprise software background. Venture-backed Black Duck makes software designed to help companies manage open-source software components. Long before Black Duck, in the early 1990s, Levin was a marketing manager at Microsoft Corp.
“I’ve been a gamer for years,” Levin said in an interview Tuesday, adding his favorite games are Microsoft Xbox console title “Halo” and Activision’s “Call of Duty.” “When I joined Microsoft, I thought I was joining the company that sells Flight Simulator,” he said.
Levin, who has been working alone on Ayeah since February, has just hired his first employee, director of marketing Liz Petersen. He said he believes Ayeah Games can do better than Facebook juggernauts like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Cafe World, by easing the transition from free pay to paid, and by providing more incentives to play the game long-term. Levin said his market research has shown players get bored with existing social game offerings.
“Social games are the new solitaire in the office,” said Levin, referring to the Microsoft desktop accessory that became one of the early workplace computer time sucks. “People play social games at work. Hopefully they’ll play it every time they see a newspaper.”
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