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Google Play Pass expands outside the US, adds more titles and annual pricing
Google Play Pass, the Android alternative to subscription-based game store Apple Arcade, is expanding. Launched in September 2019 with more than 350 apps and games, Play Pass today announced it has added 150 new titles, including Sonic the Hedgehog, Golf Peaks and kid-friendly content like apps from Sesame Workshop, for example. In addition, the service will be offered in a range of new non-U.S. markets for the first time and is adding an annual subscription option.
Unlike Apple Arcade, Google Play Pass at launch offered a combination of games and premium apps, like AccuWeather, Facetune and Pic Stitch, for example. (Facetune and AccuWeather have since been removed). It also included a notable list of launch titles, like Stardew Valley, Risk, Terraria, Monument Valley, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Reigns: Game of Thrones, Titan Quest and Wayward Souls.
The company has been steadily growing its lineup since its debut. Google says that over the past few months, it has added more than 150 titles and is preparing to roll out even more. A series of new titles will also premiere on Google Play Pass this year at launch, starting with the newly released The Almost Gone from Playdigious, available now. This will be followed by The Gardens Between and Kingdom Rush, then new releases like Bright Paw from Rogue and Line Weight from The Label coming later this year.
With the expansion, Google Play Pass now includes more than 500 apps and games.
The company is also offering a different way to pay for the subscription. Play Pass first offered users a $1.99 per month promotional subscription for the first year, which would increase to $4.99 per month afterwards. As early adopters are nearing the price change, Google is instead giving them a chance to save by paying for a year’s subscription upfront. The new annual subscription option brings the price down to $29.99 per year in the U.S., which works out to roughly $2.50 per month.
Existing subscribers will be able to make the change to an annual subscription from the Play Pass tab in the Play Store app for Android this week.
The service is also launching internationally with availability in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom, starting this week.
Because Play Pass didn’t rely as heavily on exclusives and included non-game apps, it was able to offer a larger catalog than Apple Arcade did at launch. Today, Apple touts that Arcade offers more than 100 games, while Google has added more apps than that in just the past several months.
Google also ties its payouts to developers based on Play Pass downloads, while Apple had offered upfront funding for Arcade titles, with more for exclusives. iOS developers are also under NDA about their agreements, but a revenue share is reportedly involved here, as well.
Both services cater to a growing audience interested in subscription-based entertainment, which is no longer limited to just streaming music and video. Outside of standard mobile game revenue, app subscriptions have been driving increases in consumer spend across the app stores for some time.
The Google Play Pass expansion to new markets and the annual subscription option are both rolling out this week.
Correction: Google initially described the annual subscription as U.S.-only. It will be offered elsewhere. The company updated its own announcement on the matter to clarify this.
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Kahoot raises $28M for its user-generated educational gaming platform, now valued at $1.4B
As schools stay closed and summer camp seems more like a germscape than an escape, students are staying at home for the foreseeable future and have shifted learning to their living rooms. Now, Norwegian educational gaming company Kahoot — the popular platform with 1.3 billion active users and over 100 million games (most created by users themselves) — has raised a new round of funding of $28 million to keep up with demand.
The Oslo-based startup, which started to list some of its shares on Oslo’s Merkur Market in October 2019, raised the $28 million in a private placement, and said it also raised a further $62 million in secondary shares. The new equity investment included participation from Northzone, an existing backer of the startup, and CEO Eilert Hanoa. While it’s not a traditional privately held startup in the traditional sense, at the market close today, the company’s valuation was $1.39 billion (or 13.389 billion Norwegian krone).
Existing investors in the company include Disney and Microsoft, and the company has raised $110 million to date.
Kahoot launched in 2013 and got its start and picked up most of its traction in the world of education through its use in schools, where teachers have leaned on it as a way to provide more engaging content to students to complement more traditional (and often drier) curriculum-based lessons. Alongside that, the company has developed a lucrative line of online training for enterprise users as well.
The global health pandemic has changed all of that for Kahoot, as it has for many other companies that built models based on classroom use. In the last few months, the company has boosted its content for home learning, finding an audience of users who are parents and employers looking for ways to keep students and employees more engaged.
The company says that in the last 12 months it had active users in 200 countries, with more than 50% of K-12 students using Kahoot in a school year in that footprint. On top of that, it is also used in some 87% of “top 500” universities around the world, and that 97% of Fortune 500 companies are also using it, although it doesn’t discuss what kind of penetration it has in that segment.
It seems that the coronavirus outbreak has not impacted business as much as it has in some sectors. According to the midyear report it released earlier this week, Q2 revenue is expected to be $9 million, 290% growth compared to last year and 40% growth compared to the previous quarter, and for the full year 2020, it expects revenue between $32 million and $38 million, with a full IPO expected for 2021.
As it has been doing even prior to the coronavirus outbreak, Kahoot has also continued to invest in inorganic growth to fuel its expansion. In May, it acquired math app maker DragonBox for $18 million in cash and shares. The company also runs an accelerator, Kahoot Ignite, to spur more development on its platform.
However, Hanoa said that Kahoot is shifting its focus to now also work with more mature edtech businesses.
“When we started out, we were primarily receiving requests on early stage products,” he said. “Now we have the opportunity to consider mature services for either integration or corporation. It’s a different focus.”
Update: A previous version of this story said that DragonBox was acquired in March. It was acquired in May. The story has been updated to reflect this change.
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Game downloads will be throttled to manage internet congestion
For the billions stuck at home during the global effort to flatten the curve, gaming is a welcome escape. But it’s also a bandwidth-heavy one, and Microsoft, Sony and others are working to make sure that millions of people downloading enormous games don’t suck up all the bandwidth. Don’t worry, though, it won’t affect your ping.
A blog post by content delivery network Akamai explained a few things it is doing to help mitigate the tidal wave of traffic that the internet’s infrastructure is experiencing. Although streaming video is of course a major contributor, games are a huge, if more intermittent, burden on the network.
Akamai is “working with leading distributors of software, particularly for the gaming industry, including Microsoft and Sony, to help manage congestion during peak usage periods. This is very important for gaming software downloads, which account for large amounts of internet traffic when an update is released,” the post reads.
Take the new “Call of Duty: Warzone” battle royale game, released last week for free and seeing major engagement. If you didn’t already own the latest CoD title, Warzone was a more than 80-gigabyte download, equivalent to dozens of movies on Netflix . And what’s more, that 80 gigs was likely downloaded at the maximum bandwidth home connections provided; streaming video is limited to a handful of megabits over the duration of the media, nowhere close to saturating your connection.
And Warzone isn’t alone — there are tons of high-profile games being released at a time when many people have nothing to do but sit at home and play games — PC game platform Steam posted a record 20 million concurrent players the other day, and one analysis saw a 400% increase in gaming traffic. So gaming is bigger than ever, while games are bigger than ever themselves.
As a result, gaming downloads will be throttled for the foreseeable future, at least in some markets. “Players may experience somewhat slower or delayed game downloads,” wrote Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan in a brief blog post. I’ve asked Microsoft, Nintendo and Valve for comment on their approach as well.
It’s important to note that this should not apply to the rest of the gaming experience. Unlike downloading games, playing games is a remarkably low-bandwidth task — it’s important for packets to be traded quickly so players are in sync, but there aren’t a lot of them compared with even a low-resolution streaming video.
The best thing to do is to set your games to be downloaded overnight, as local infrastructure will be less taxed while everyone in your region is asleep. If you have downloads or updates coming during the day, don’t be surprised if they take longer than usual or are queued elsewhere.
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Female-led Robin Games raises $7M to combine lifestyle content with fantasy gaming
As a former Jam City executive, Jill Wilson led teams behind some of the top-grossing gaming franchises, like Cookie Jam and Panda Pop. Now she’s running her own startup, Robin Games, where a team of mostly women is working to create a new niche in mobile entertainment they’re calling “lifestyle gaming.” As the name implies, the idea is to create a mobile gaming experience — in this case, fantasy gaming — that’s more like the sophisticated and stylish lifestyle content that’s popular today.
Robin Games is backed by $7 million in seed funding, the company announced on Thursday, as it made its public debut. The round was led by early-stage fund LVP, which has invested in other to game companies including Supercell, Playfish, and NaturalMotion . Additional investors in the oversubscribed round include 1Up Ventures, Alpha Edison, Everblue Management, firstminute Capital, Greycroft Tracker Fund, Hearst Ventures, and Third Kind Venture Capital.
“Traditionally in gaming, when you say ‘fantasy,’ you mean dragons and other mythical creatures, disproportionately built women, armies and battles and explosions and glory,” explained Wilson, Robin Games’ sole founder and CEO. “As a lifelong gamer, I love (most) of these themes, but traditional gamers are no longer in the majority. Thanks to the smartphone, everyone now has access to a gaming console in their pockets. We are expanding the definition of “fantasy” for this modern wave of gamers, whose fantasies are just as diverse as they are,” she added.
Wilson clarified that she’s not meaning to stereotype women as not enjoying fantasy games about things like warriors and dragons. Instead, Robin Games aims to expand the types of fantasies being explored through gaming — including those mobile gaming has yet to include.
While the company isn’t yet announcing its first titles or specific details, like launch dates, the games are said to cover content you’d typically find in a lifestyle magazine, on an Instagram influencer’s profile or on a lifestyle blog for example.
“We are focused on developing games that are deeply sophisticated under the hood, with an elevated, real-world, approachable style that reflects more of the lifestyle content you’d previously see outside of gaming,” Wilson told TechCrunch .
All this will be wrapped up in the free-to-play business model that powers most top-grossing games. In addition, Robin Games’ strategy will allow it to expand to include a partnership strategy, which will diversify its revenue streams further down the road.
Wilson said the idea for Robin Games was something she had in mind for some time, as she was personally looking for games to like this to play herself — only to find they didn’t exist.
“I’ve always designed products for myself first and foremost, which allows me to deeply connect with what the end-user really wants — since the end-user is me,” said Wilson. “Recently, I realized that not only did we have a unique answer to a pretty major gap in the market, but also that the timing was right and, most importantly, that we could pull together the exact right team to execute this vision.”
The startup is currently a team of nine based in Venice Beach. Management is 80% women and everyone had worked together to make hit games in years prior. In terms of hiring, the company is focused on building out a diverse team in order to better realize its vision, Wilson said, and, more broadly, change the face of the gaming industry as it stands today.
“Our mission goes beyond filling a gap in the market. We’re really looking to shake up the games industry, not only redefining what a modern game team looks like, but also changing the definition itself of what it means to be a gamer,” noted Wilson.
In previous studies, female players have been shown to prefer match-3 and social farming games, among others, with fantasy and MMOs further down the list, and sports and shooting games last. But the types of games Robin Games is proposing don’t really fit into any one category that exists today, so it’s still unknown how female gamers will respond.
However, it makes sense to target this underserved market, given that women account for 46% of all U.S. game enthusiasts.
“Jill Wilson and her incredible team are already further along than most developers starting out,” added Are Mack Growen, partner at LVP and member of Robin Games’ Board of Directors, about the firm’s investment. “This team has developed and operated some of the world’s most successful games for a decade, and now they have assembled to bring premium experiences to the massively underserved audience of women. In addition to their industry expertise, they fundamentally understand their audience and the ingredients for powerful entertainment. We are proud to have led their seed round and look forward to helping them redefine what it means to be a gamer.”
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Roblox raises $150M Series G, led by Andreessen Horowitz, now valued at $4B
Online gaming platform Roblox, now home to 115 million largely Gen Z players per month, announced today it has raised $150 million in Series G funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Late Stage Venture fund. The company will also open a tender offer for up to $350 million of common and preferred shares, it says.
The company has previously offered stakeholders and employees liquidity through periodic secondary offerings, as it believes in its long-term potential. Roblox is also cash-flow positive, according to its CFO Michael Guthrie.
Others participating in the Series G include new investors Temasek and Tencent Holdings Limited, as well as existing investors Altos Ventures, Meritech Capital, and Tiger Global Management.
The funding comes at a period of significant growth for the gaming platform. Just last summer, it was being visited by 100 million users, topping Minecraft, and its developer community of over 2 million actives earned $110 million in 2019 — up from around $70+ million in 2018 and $40+ million in 2017.
Since then, Roblox has further invested in its developer business, with the launch of new tools for building more realistic 3D experiences and a marketplace where creators can sell their own development assets and tools to others, among other things.
Roblox offers a platform for its developers to build upon, similar to the App Store. Many of its most popular games are free, instead monetizing as players spend on in-game items using virtual cash called Robux. Some of its largest games average over 10 million users monthly. Over 10 games have seen more than 1 billion visits.
Players on Roblox often do more than just focus on completing a goal or task — they go online to hang out with friends in a gaming environment. Half of weekly active users go to Roblox to play with friends. In addition, half of Roblox users update their avatar every month.
In recent months, Roblox has also been working to take its platform further outside the U.S. including most notably China. Last year, Roblox entered a strategic partnership with Tencent in an effort to bring its platform and coding curriculum to the region, including by adding support for Chinese languages and running coder camps. Today, Roblox has players and creators in over 200 countries, it says.
As of last year, Roblox was valued at $2.5 billion, with roughly half of U.S. children ages 9 through 12 playing on its platform, according to comScore. This remains true today. In addition, its user base overall skews younger, with over 40% 13 and up.
The company is now valued at $4 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported. (TechCrunch additionally understands this to be true. Roblox isn’t commenting.)
Today, Roblox says its user base is spending a collective 1.5 billion hours per month on its service. And because it’s accessible across platforms, users often move from PC to smartphone to continue to play — a newer trend in online gaming, and one that’s also driving adoption of games like Fortnite, PUBG, and others.
“We are big believers in Roblox’s long-term vision, and are confident in backing the team as they enter this next inflection point,” said David George, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, of the firm’s investment. “Roblox is one of those rare platform companies with massive traction and an organic, high-growth business model that will advance the company, and push the industry forward for many years to come,” he added.
Roblox plans to leverage the new funds to continue its growth, including international; further build out its developer tools and ecosystem; and invest in engineering talent and infrastructure.
“We’ve stayed true to our vision of creating a safe and civil place where people come together to create, learn, and have fun, and it’s amazing to see what we’ve built together with our global creator community,” said David Baszucki, CEO and co-founder of Roblox, in a statement. “Looking ahead, we’re doubling down on our commitment to building the most advanced tools and technology to take our creators and players into the metaverse of the future.”
Updated, 2/26/20, 7:30 PM ET with more updated statistics.
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GameSnacks, from Google’s Area 120, brings fast, casual online games to developing markets
A new project called GameSnacks is launching today from Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, with the goal of bringing fast-loading, casual online games to users in developing markets. Billions of people are coming online through mobile devices. But they’re often on low memory devices with expensive data plans and struggle with unreliable network connections. That makes web gaming inaccessible to millions, as the games aren’t optimized for these sorts of constraints.
Today, over half of mobile website visitors leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, but on low memory devices and 2G or 3G networks, a typical web game will load much more slowly — even triple or quadruple that load time, or worse.
The idea with GameSnacks is to speed up load time and performance of web games by reducing the size of the initially-loaded HTML page, compressing additional assets like scripts, images, and sounds, then waiting to load them until necessary.
GameSnacks says this allows its games to load in a few seconds even on network connections as slow as 500 Kbps.
For instance, A GameSnacks title called Tower is ready to play on a 1 GB RAM device over 3G within just a few seconds. A typical web game on that same device took as long as 12 seconds, the company claims.
In addition, GameSnacks’ games are simple, casual games that only last a few minutes. They’re meant to fill those idle moments you have when waiting line, waiting at the bus stop, or waiting for a doctor’s appointment to start, for example. The games are also designed to have straightforward rules so they can be learned without instructions.
While mobile may be a primary platform, GameSnacks’ games are also accessible on any web-capable device, including desktop computers with a keyboard and mouse. On mobile, both iOS and Android are supported.
At launch, GameSnacks is partnering with a leading technology platform in Southeast Asia, Gojek, which is bringing the new games to their ecosystem through the GoGames service. Initially, this partnership is focused on delivering games to users in Indonesia before expanding elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Currently, GameSnacks is working with developers including Famobi, Inlogic Games, Black Moon Design, Geek Games, and Enclave Games. Other HTML5 game developers who think their title may make sense in the GameSnacks catalog are encouraged to reach out.
GameSnacks’ business model will ultimately involve other partnerships that allow other developers to embed GameSnacks games into their own apps, even customized to feel native to that app’s experience.
Founded by Ani Mohan and Neel Rao, GameSnacks is a team of six working within Area 120 at Google, which is home to a variety of experimental ideas, including those in social networking, video, advertising, education, transit, business and more.
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Apple and Google reveal the best apps and games of 2019
Continuing their annual tradition, Apple and Google have released their list of the best apps and games of 2019. Apple, for the first time, held a real-world event to celebrate its winners, where it crowned AI-powered camera app Spectre Camera as its best iPhone app of the year and Sky: Children of the Light as its best game. Google, meanwhile, dubbed video messaging app Ablo as its app winner and Call of Duty: Mobile as its best game.
Apple’s event held in New York put its winning developers in front of media in order to demonstrate their apps and games. The event was less formal than the Apple Design Awards held at the company’s worldwide developer conference each year, and instead focused on private presentations to press.
Apple said its winners this year sit “at the nexus of digital and pop culture,” but its list really better highlights what Apple thinks are the key selling features for its devices. For example, with Spectre Camera by Lux Optics, it’s about the iPhone’s ability to serve as your main camera even for complicated tasks like long-exposure photos.
The iPad app of the year was Flow by Moleskin, an app that already won a 2019 Design Award. In this case, the digital notebook app shows off a top iPad use case of being a device aimed at creative professionals. Users can take advantage of its digital graphite pencils and chisel-tipped markers to draw and sketch as they could in real life.
The Mac app of the year, Affinity Publisher by Serif Labs, allows users to design and publish books, magazines, brochures, posters and more — a task that best lends itself to a larger device with a full-sized keyboard.
Finally, the Apple TV app of the year, The Explorers by The Explorers Network, showcases something that works best on your TV’s larger, high-def screen. The app’s community of photographers and videographers are working together to create a visual inventory of the natural world, which you can enjoy on your big screen.
Apple’s iPhone Game of the Year, Sky: Children of the Light by thatgamecompany (makers of Journey, the 2013 Game of the Year), iPad Game of the Year Hyper Light Drifter by Abylight S.L. and Mac Game of the Year GRIS by Nomada Studio, are all the sort of beautifully designed games that Apple prefers to showcase.
Today’s gaming market has become over-filled with free-to-play titles due to the sort of supported business models that work on the App Store. That’s something Apple Arcade is an attempt to correct, in fact. Apple winners show that even free games can be works of art.
Sky: Children...is a free to play social adventure with in-app purchases, but is also beautiful and creative. Similarly, adventure game Hyper Light was already a visual arts award winner at the Independent Games Festival. And GRIS has been described as one of the most gorgeous games.
The Apple TV Game of the Year, Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap by DotEmu, was developed by LizardCube with the cooperation of series creator Ryuichi Nishizawa to bring an ’80s cult classic back to life. That’s part of one of Apple’s larger App Store gaming trends — a year of “blockbusters reimagined.”
Apple also gave mention of other launches in this space, like Mario Kart Tour, Dr. Mario World, Minecraft Earth, Pokémon Masters, Assassin’s Creed Rebellion, Gears POP!, The Elder Scrolls: Blades, Alien: Blackout and Google’s Game of the Year, Call of Duty: Mobile.
And in what could be the start of a new tradition, Apple also anointed an Apple Arcade Game of the Year with the gorgeous, fast-paced and music-filled Sayonara Wild Hearts developed by Simogo and published by Annapurna Interactive.
Apple’s year-end list also highlighted App Store non-gaming trend of “Storytelling,” which featured a variety of apps to tell stories, including visually, as well as through audio and text. Noted apps here were Anchor, Canva, Unfold, Steller, Spark Camera, Over and Wattpad.
Google doesn’t go all-out as Apple does for its “Best of 2019” picks.
Instead, it simply featured best app Ablo and best game Call of Duty: Mobile as its editorial picks, then leaves the rest to a User’s Choice. Voters selected the same game, but gave the Best App award to a video editor, Glitch Video Effects.
Google’s full list also includes Google Play’s best e-books, audiobooks, TV shows and movies, which you can see here.
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GameClub offers mobile gaming’s greatest hits for $5 per month
Apple Arcade introduced the idea of all-you-can-eat subscription-based mobile gaming to the mainstream. Google Play Pass soon followed as a way to subscribe to a sizable collection of both apps and games on Android devices. Today, a startup called GameClub is launching in the U.S. to offer an alternative. For $4.99 per month, mobile consumers will be able to access a library that includes some of the best games to have ever hit the App Store.
To be clear, GameClub is not a cloud gaming platform, like Google Stadia. It’s a way to subscribe to actual App Store games, similar to Arcade. In GameClub’s case, however, the focus is not on new releases but on quality games that already have proven track records and high ratings.
In fact, many GameClub games have made Apple’s own editorially selected “Game of the Year” lists in years past. And like the games offered on Apple Arcade, they don’t have ads or any in-app purchases.
At launch, GameClub’s library includes more than 100 titles, with around half that available for play today. More titles will roll out on a weekly basis in the months ahead. Combined, the games have over 100 million collective downloads, the company says.
On GameClub, you’ll find games like: Super Crate Box, Hook Champ, Mage Gauntlet, Space Miner, Forget-Me-Not, MiniSquadron, Plunderland, Pocket RPG, Sword of Fargoal, Incoboto, Tales of the Adventure Company, Hook Worlds, Orc: Vengeance, Mr. Particle-Man, Legendary Wars, Deathbat, The Path to Luma, Grimm, Zombie Match, Faif, iBlast Moki 2, Kano, Baby Lava Bounce, Run Roo Run, Gears and many others.
It’s a selection that extends across gaming categories, like Action, Arcade, Puzzle, Adventure, Platformer, Retro, Role Playing, Simulation, Strategy and more.
To use the service, you first download the main GameClub app, which becomes the hub for your GameClub activities. You then sign up for the $4.99 per month subscription, which includes a 30-day free trial. Within the main app, you can browse the available titles as well as read editorial content like in-depth overviews and histories, get tips and learn about gaming strategies.
The startup was founded last year by game industry vets Dan Sherman and Oliver Pedersen.
Sherman, GameClub CEO, has worked in the gaming industry for around 17 years, including time spent at EA and his own startup, Tilting Point. His experience has involved, predominantly, signing content partnerships with game creators. Pedersen, meanwhile, built backend systems and platforms for games, including at Yahoo Games.
Though GameClub is seemingly arriving after Apple Arcade’s debut, it actually began before that. The startup was founded in 2018, ahead of any Apple Arcade rumors. It went live on iOS outside the U.S. before Arcade launched.
The founders say they were inspired to address the issues caused by the free-to-play model that has infiltrated the gaming industry. In addition, they had witnessed a decline in consumers’ willingness to purchase content upfront, which was impacting the industry.
“I was seeing all these amazing game developers leave mobile because the types of games they make are not the types of games that monetize through in-app purchases and ads,” Sherman tells TechCrunch. “The free-to-play model actually only works for a handful of genres,” he explains. “A lot of companies make a lot of money through a very small number of genres and game experiences — to the exclusion of a lot of other types of genres that GameClub is bringing back — action, adventures, arcade, tower defense — anything that can be completed.”
With free-to-play, games are built around perpetual retention loops. “And the freemium model comes out of the casino industry, not the premium game industry,” Sherman points out.
But because this is how games could make money, it led to homogeneity in the marketplace, he says.
GameClub aims to offer a subscription to the premium games that got left behind.
They are meant to be wholesome and fun, not overly addictive. They’re not designed to manipulate you into spending money. You simply pay your subscription fee every month to access the catalog, then play unencumbered.
Thanks to Apple Arcade and Google Play Pass, consumers are now comfortable with the idea of the subscription model for mobile games. And other services — like Spotify Netflix, and Xbox Game Pass, for example — have pushed the idea of subscription access to content across platforms and genres.
GameClub is different from Arcade, however, because it’s not funding the development of content upfront — at least, not yet. Instead, it’s forging agreements with largely indie developers to release their existing IP as a GameClub exclusive.
This may include bringing an older game into the 64-bit era — something GameClub handles on their behalf.
“Many of [the GameClub titles] have been gone for many years,” says Sherman. “It’s with our team, our technology and our developers that they’ve been brought back. And they’ve been brought back in a way that is 100% using the original code and the exact same design…but making them look and feel new, with higher resolution, Retina Display assets and by optimizing for the latest screen sizes and configurations,” he adds.
The company doesn’t discuss the business model for GameClub, but it’s not the same as Apple Arcade’s pay-upfront model.
What Sherman could say is that the more important the game is to the GameClub service, the more money the creator makes. Additionally, GameClub says it’s transparent with developers about its subscription revenue, so there’s no question about which games are earning or why.
The same can’t be said for Apple Arcade, which is a total black box to the point that consumers don’t know which Arcade games are most popular, developers can’t see how they’re doing compared with others and third-party measurement firms have no data.
Of course, there could be concerns that GameClub exists in a gray area, with regard to App Store policy. Those with longer memories may recall that Apple banned app-stores-within-a-store starting back in 2012. The company had kicked out apps that recommended other apps like AppHero, FreeAppADay, Daily App Dream, AppShopper and more. It also banned the more popular app recommendation service AppGratis the following year.
But Apple’s concern was that these apps were leveraging their power to manipulate App Store charts and rankings, often charging for that service. GameClub, on the other hand, plays fairly. Its service also benefits Apple, by offering subscription access to quality games that couldn’t thrive as free-to-play titles.
Longer-term, GameClub wants to produce its own original content and offer its service across platforms, starting with Google Play, but eventually tackling PC and console gaming.
The startup is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Copenhagen. In addition to the founders, it includes Eli Hodapp, the former editor-in-chief of the popular game news and review site TouchArcade, and COO Britt Myers, the former chief product officer of subscription-based edtech apps platform Homer.
With the close of a seed round last week, GameClub is backed by $4.6 million in funding.
Investors from a round that closed last year include GC VR Gaming Tracker Fund, CRCM Ventures, Watertower Ventures, Ride Ventures, BreakawayGrowth Fund and others. New investors include GFR Fund, Gramercy Fund, Century Gold and others.
GameClub is available on the App Store.
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This Week in Apps: AltStore, acquisitions and Google Play Pass
The app industry shows no signs of slowing down, with 194 billion downloads in 2018 and over $100 billion in consumer spending. People spend 90% of their mobile time in apps and more time using their mobile devices than watching TV. In other words, apps aren’t just a way to spend idle hours — they’re a big business. And one that often seems to change overnight. In this new Extra Crunch series, we’ll help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps — including everything from the OS’s to the apps that run upon them, as well as the money that flows through it all.
This week, alternatives to the traditional app store is a big theme. Not only has a new, jailbreak-free iOS marketplace called AltStore just popped up, we’ve also got both Apple and Google ramping up their own subscription-based collections of premium apps and games.
Meanwhile, the way brands and publishers want to track their apps’ success is changing, too. And App Annie — the company that was the first to start selling pickaxes for the App Store gold rush — is responding with an acquisition that will help app publishers better understand the return on investment for their app businesses.
Headlines
AltStore is an alternative App Store that doesn’t need a jailbreak
An interesting alternative app marketplace has appeared on the scene, allowing a way for developers to distribute iOS apps outside the official App Store, reports Engadget — without jailbreaking, which can be difficult and has various security implications. Instead, the new store works by tricking your device into thinking you’re a developer sideloading apps. And it uses a companion app on your Mac or PC to re-sign the apps every 7 days via iTunes WiFi syncing protocol. Already, it’s offering a Nintendo emulator and other games, says The Verge. And Apple is probably already working on a way to shut this down. For now, it’s live at Altstore.io.
Very excited to officially announce AltStore: an alternative app store for iOS — no jailbreak required. Launching this Saturday, September 28, but you can download the preview TODAY https://t.co/M7nULBV28p
— Riles
(@rileytestut) September 25, 2019
For the third time in a month, Google mass-deleted Android apps from a big Chinese developer.
Does Google Play have a malicious app problem? That appears to be the case as Google has booted some 46 apps from major Chinese mobile developer iHandy out of its app store, BuzzFeed reported. And it isn’t saying why. The move follows Google’s ban of two other major Chinese app developers, DO Global and CooTek, who had 1 billion total downloads.
Google Firebase gets new tools
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Google Play Pass launches with 350+ premium apps and games, initially for $1.99 per month
Following the well-received launch of Apple Arcade, Google today is officially introducing its own take on subscription-based access to premium mobile games — or, in Google’s case, premium mobile apps, too. The new Google Play Pass subscription, arriving this week, will offer more than 350 apps and games that are completely unlocked, with no upfront fees, in-app purchases or advertisements. And the initial price point is something of a no-brainer — it’s just $1.99 per month for the first year, Google says.
That price will increase to $4.99 per month after the first 12 months have passed, which is the same price as Apple Arcade at launch. This launch promotion is only available until October 10, 2019, however.
The two services are similar in concept, as both are providing a large library of premium content for a monthly subscription. But there are some differences between the two.
For starters, Apple Arcade is filled with exclusives — meaning its games will not be found on Andriod. The reverse is not true for Google Play Pass. Instead, the Play Pass catalog includes many cross-platform titles, including some that even found their fame first on iOS, like ustwo’s Monument Valley.
In addition, Play Pass’s launch titles aren’t all games. There are also ad-free versions of popular mobile apps, like AccuWeather, Facetune and Pic Stitch, for example.
Notable launch titles include Stardew Valley, Risk, Terraria, Monument Valley, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Reigns: Game of Thrones, Titan Quest and Wayward Souls. Some lesser-known additions include LIMBO, Lichtspeer, Mini Metro and Old Man’s Journey. Others, like This War of Mine and Cytus, are coming soon. And for little kids, there are some preschooler-friendly titles like Toca Boca classics and the My Town series.
More titles are added on a monthly basis, Google says.
Because it’s not relying on exclusives; Google’s catalog is more than triple the size of Apple’s at launch. That being said, Apple’s Arcade library is filled with gorgeous, high-quality games while Play Pass is rounded out with a lot more utilities, like weather apps and photo editors.
Like Apple Arcade, the new subscription gets its own tab in the Google Play app, where the games are organized by genre, popularity and other factors — just like a mini app store. However, unlike Apple Arcade, where games are only found in the Arcade tab or through search, Google Play Pass titles will appear directly in the Play Store. They’ll be designated with a Play Pass ticket badge, so you can easily identify them.
The Play Pass subscription also allows the games to be shared with the whole family. The family manager can share their Play Pass subscription with up to five other family members, who can each access the titles independently. This is comparable to Apple Arcade.
We already knew Google was working on an Apple Arcade competitor before today. The Play Pass subscription’s existence had been leaked, and Google later confirmed the service with a tweet. What we didn’t yet know was the launch date, lineup or the official pricing.
Google Play Pass service is rolling out this week to Android devices in the U.S., with more countries coming soon. A 10-day subscription is available, before it converts to the $1.99 per month limited promotion, followed by the $4.99 per month price point when the promotion ends.
While neither Apple nor Google is discussing the terms of their deals with developers, Google says the more people download a Play Pass title, the more the revenue developers receive on a recurring basis. It also explained that Google itself is funding the initial launch offer, so developers can gain more subscriber interest without impacting their revenue.
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