Rex Ng Joins with Lolapps to Take on Zynga

Game publisher Rex Ng joins forces with developer Arjun Sethi to create a social gaming powerhouse.

Social game publisher Rex Ng is merging his 6waves with game developer Lolapps as a step toward building the scale to take on industry leader Zynga. The new company, dubbed 6waves Lolapps, will become the number two player in the social gaming sphere, with over 39 million active monthly Facebook users and 4.4 million daily users.

Hong Kong-based Ng will become CEO, but the company’s new center of gravity will be San Francisco where most of the firm’s 120 employees are based. A few will work out of offices in Hong Kong, Japan and the U.K. in keeping with 6waves Lolapps’ ambition to embark on aggressive global expansion.

Former Lolapps founder and CEO Arjun Sethi will report to Ng but will continue to be in charge of the game development area which will largely remain separate from the publishing side of the business. The integration will focus primarily on international publishing strategy and licensing agreements for the Fliso game engine that Lolapp had acquired, along with its creator Sean Cooper, shortly before the merger.

The Fliso Flash graphics engine lets developers build 3D environments on an isometric field, the standard for most Facebook games. With Cooper’s efforts now in house, 6wave Lolapps has already begun developing a more powerful version of Fliso for future licensing to developers. The licensing is a key tool in the company’s ambition to become the leading facilitator and publisher for third-party game developers. Prior to the merger 6waves had worked with three dozen 3rd party developers and plans to expand that number.

“We still want to keep things pretty independent,” Ng told ISG. “Lolapps has a pretty full [release schedule] for the year, so we don’t want to [disrupt] that. We’re still deciding whether or not to physically join offices.”

The main goal of the merger is to give 6waves Lolapps a big edge over rivals in quickly bringing new social games online.

The company’s leading title is Ravenwood Fair, developed by Lolapps and published by 6waves. It is currently published in nine languages but Lollapps has already begun working with Facebook to add versions in Portuguese, Russian, Arabic and Korean.

6waves has also recently published several hits, including Camelot: The Game. Lolapps is currently finishing up Ravenshire Castle and a game titled Ravensky to be released before the end of 2011.

Each side of the combined company had been profitable, but its aggressive expansion plans will quickly draw down the $17.5 million raised by Ng and the $4.4 million raised by Sethi prior to the merger. Ng is already planning another round of venture capital within the coming six months. Ng has been following Zynga’s IPO filing with great interest with an eye toward scaling up 6waves Lolapps in preparation for an IPO of its own.

Rex Ng founded 6waves in early 2008 with two fellow ex-Yahoo employees.

Arjun Sethi was the CEO and founder of social gaming startup ROFLplay which was acquired by Lolapps in July 2009. He was initially appointed head of business development for Lolapps before being named CEO in March 2010. Sethi has held various management roles with the Carlyle Group and Saset Healthcare. In 1999 he co-founded Advanced Tuning Products, an auto industry partsmaker. Sethi earned a bachelors degree in history and economics from the University of Maryland at College Park.