Ignite raises $7.5 million for online racing games

In the tradition of other realistic and pinnacle titles, Ignite to bring high quality to online

Online gaming company Ignite Game Technologies, revving up to release a new racing game, announced Tuesday that it has secured $7.5 million in Series B financing from private investors, led by Steve Belotti and Bill Budinger Jr. Previously, the company had raised a $3 million Series A in 2010 and a $1.7 million seed, for a total of $12.2 million in financing raised.

At its heart, Ignite seeks to continue the tradition of high-quality racing games like Gran Turismo 5, except in the online gaming space specifically.

“There are a number of great racing games on the market but the genre as a whole has seen little real innovation in the past 10 years,” said Jonathan Haswell, CEO of Ignite, in a prepared statement.  “Most titles make year-over-year incremental changes to visual fidelity and the breadth of cars and tracks on the disc – the eye candy.  Ignite will offer a fresh take on the genre, one that rethinks some of the fundamentals and focuses relentlessly on a core aim of live multiplayer racing.”

Haswell suggests there are three tiers of racing games, in terms of fidelity and physics: arcade, realistic and pinnacle. If we think of “realistic” games as those high-end consumer releases like Gran Turismo and “pinnacle” as highly-immersive simulation racing, then you see the two spaces Ignite wants to thrive in.

Ignite has much invested in player-skill matching, for a fair online multiplayer experience, and other social interactions.

Thankfully for a company like this one, the online gaming industry is booming. Ignite cites DFC Intelligence as predicting the space to double from $16 billion today to $30 billion by 2016, or around $14 billion in growth in half a decade.

“There is a transition going on where social gaming is exploding and in online gaming, as a whole, there are wider aspects of deeper gaming activity taking over the console market,” Haswell told me over the phone.

He sees “racing and sports titles coming up for grabs because underlying platforms are shifting.”

Though he remained mostly tight-lipped, Haswell let on that over the next few weeks we’d see an announcement with more details about Ignite’s upcoming products.

The new funding will be used to continue development of the company’s product as well as to make around 12 additional hires in the near future, with positions open for several gaming-related engineering jobs.