GameHouse was founded by Ben Exworthy and Garr Godfrey in 1998. The first downloadable game developed by the company was Collapse!, a game somewhat similar to Tetris. In 2003, company revenues topped $10 million. In 2004, GameHouse was acquired by RealNetworks for $14.6 million cash and about 3.3 million RNWK shares, then estimated at $21 million. After the acquisition, the GameHouse studio continued operations as a developer, while its games were distributed via RealNetworks, and the GameHouse game portal continued to operate alongside the RealArcade gaming service. On November 3, 2009, RealArcade had announced they are merging with GameHouse to create a large distribution platform. Such plans include migrating the accounts of users from RealArcade, offering discounts and special offers to GamePass members and new social community opportunities. The merger was completed on November 13. As a result, all customers visiting the RealArcade website are redirected to Gamehouse.com.
Locations
GameHouse's main offices are in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The company also has studios in Barcelona and Alicante. GameHouse has been working on developing their own original story games like the popular Delicious series and continues to release multiple story-driven time management games per year on mobile, as well as maintaining their Zylom and GameHouse websites on which they publish games by other developers too.
RealArcade
RealArcade was a gaming service run by RealNetworks that sold casual-style computer games to individual users. Its purpose was to let users download demo versions of games, and optionally buy the full versions.
Sales model
RealArcade distributes games on a time-limited demo basis. Each game downloaded has a trial time of 60 minutes unless differently specified by each publisher. Once the trial time expires, users are required either to uninstall the game from their computer or to purchase the full version of the game. Users can also subscribe to a RealNetworks service called GamePass. For a monthly fee, it offers a free ownership of a single game of their choice per month at no additional fees and $5.00 off each game purchase. As of November 2009, GameHouse, a subsidiary of RealNetworks, offers full versions of some of its games, supported by in-game advertising.
