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Overwolf raises $52.5M for its platform to build, distribute and monetize in-game, user-generated content
Roblox, the gaming company that went public this month with a strong debut, changed the game (so to speak) for the role that creative input can play in making a game more loved, more engaging and even more enterprising. Today, a startup that is taking a version of that model — focused on in-game apps and modifications — is announcing some funding and the launch of a new toolkit to double down on that opportunity.
Today, a startup called Overwolf, which has built a popular platform for gaming fans to build modifications (mods) and additional tools for all kinds of PC games, is announcing $52.5 million in growth funding and the launch of a new content creation SDK — underscoring its growth and more specifically the demand in the market to bring more user-generated content variations into the gaming universe.
The company’s platform has some 30,000 creators, 90,000 mods and add-ons and 18 million monthly users across thousands of games, including Fortnite, World of Warcraft and Minecraft. In the last year, which has seen a surge of gaming activity as more people stay home throughout the pandemic, Overwolf’s revenue has grown by 300%, it said.
“We want to be what YouTube is for YouTubers,” said Uri Marchand, the CEO and co-founder of Tel Aviv-based Overwolf, in an interview with TechCrunch. “Just as YouTube is a one-stop shop for video, we want to be a one-stop shop for creating apps and mods.”
The Series C is being co-led by Insight Partners and Griffin Gaming Partners, a VC that specialises in gaming content. Other investors in the round include Ubisoft, Warner Music Group, Meg Whitman and Gen.G co-founder, Kevin Chou. Valuation is not being disclosed.
Importantly, alongside the funding, Overwolf is introducing a new service called CurseForge Core, an SDK that can be integrated directly into a game itself to make it easier for gaming enthusiasts and developers to build user-generated content for it. CurseForge Core is essentially the next iteration of CurseForge, the mods platform that Overwolf acquired from Amazon’s Twitch last year for an undisclosed sum.
The buyer and acquirer here continue to have a close relationship, even as Overwolf also looks to work more closely with others like Discord, which says something about what makes up the bigger ecosystem of communication and activity among gamers outside of the core experience of a game itself.
Prior to launching this SDK, Overwolf already had built out a large community of users — both on its own steam and by way of its acquisition of CurseForge. While that is entirely focused on PC games at the moment, the plan will be to expand its reach to other platforms, including Macs, console games and mobile gaming, in the next year.
The gap in the market that Overwolf has identified and built for is the demand from avid gamers for more tools to improve their experience of the game, sometimes very specific ones that might not be core to everyone’s experience but definitely wanted by enough people to merit their creation.
These can be, for example, maps to navigate your way around a game, or dashboards or leaderboards to keep better track of various statistics of characters and other players, tools to modify characters, or apps to communicate with other players when you’re inside a game. Marchand points out that he first got into this world as a mod maker himself, years ago creating a Skype app for World of Warcraft.
“We pivoted from making mods to making a platform for others to make mods and additions,” he said. “When you think about all the aspects that need to be addressed — they include telemetry, the interactive UI, analytics, installers — they can be very complicated. So we provided platform essentials to help developers figure it all out.”
While games developers might have a very specific vision of how they would like their games to look at play, as Marchand described it to me, it’s also a big part of PC gaming culture to be able to play around with those experiences to make them unique to each player. But handling the work of third-party ecosystems is not typically in their core competencies.
“The scale and diversity of that content makes it impossible for a game maker to capture and do it all,” said Marchand. “History has proven that while game makers would like to encourage UGC they can’t and that is why we exist.”
Even if building an SDK that sits inside games themselves is a logical next step, it also represents a kind of increased trust between Overwolf and games publishers.
“Overwolf is developing the holy grail of frameworks for UGC for both publishers and in-game creators. Enabling all major publishers like us, to allow the creation of mods in a safe, secure, authorized, and profitable manner; is a game changer for all creators and IP holders,” said Oscar Navarro, head of Corporate Development for Ubisoft, in a statement.
Indeed, the trade-off for games publishers are more tools that will potentially keep users further engaged. The SDK will cover tools such as cross-platform modding, to let players discover and install mods in-game, across all platforms and storefronts; an analytics dashboard to have better visibility on how well various mods are performing; moderation tools to better vet what third-party content gets submitted; and monetization tools to bring in more creators. As with other platforms that incentivize creators, these include an Author Rewards Program, fund investments, developer contests and hackathons.
“We’ve been following UGC in gaming for many years and believe Overwolf has established itself as a leader in this category,” said Teddie Wardi, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “AAA game studios will want to allow creators to build and express themselves, and Overwolf is positioned as the platform to make this possible by ensuring that creators are recognized for their contributions, and easily integrating creations into games. Overwolf has proved themselves to be strong champions of the creator community and we look forward to helping them scale up in 2021.”
Financial incentives will continue to stand out for these creators, who today make most of their money not from paid mods and apps, but from in-mod or in-app advertising, a network that is run by Overwolf itself. Marchand said that the most successful developers can bring in revenues of $100,000 each month.
While Marchand likens Overwolf aims to YouTube, investors see a parallel in Unity, another key toolkit for the games developer community.
“Similar to how developers use Unity to build a game, we see Overwolf as the framework for everything UGC related to games. Overwolf allows for one of the only means of monetization for the thousands of creators, in turn, this translates to increased engagement for the publishers and more content for gamers. Services like Overwolf set the stage for the industry to see a new generation of user-generated content and we are excited to invest in the leading company moving this space forward,” commented Nick Tuosto, co-founder of Griffin Gaming Partners and managing director at LionTree, in a statement.
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With 1v1Me, anyone can gamble on their ability to crush an opponent in player vs. player games
Anthony Geranio has played video games for the past 13 years. The 26-year-old first-time founder of 1v1Me, a new company that lets anyone gamble on their ability to win in a player versus player game, tried to make it as a professional gamer, but when that didn’t work, he turned to the tech industry.
Geranio and his co-founder Alex Emmanuel bounced between companies like TextNow, Skillshare and Grailed to combine both of their passions — gaming and entrepreneurship — into a new company.
“The reason I got into programming was because I wanted to be my own boss one day,” Geranio said. And even though he was making $200,000 a year working at mission-driven tech companies, Geranio said he still wasn’t fulfilled.
The COVID-19 pandemic finally convinced Geranio and Emmanuel to take the plunge. All of Geranio’s friends had started lockdown whiling away the hours by playing poker online for money. Then poker turned into Call of Duty, which turned into Madden, which became whatever else the kids play these days (my gaming days ended with Mortal Kombat II).
Geranio then went to On Deck and, after graduating, began knocking on investors’ doors. The company managed to raise more than $2 million from investors, including On Deck, Erik Torenberg at Village Global, Turner Novak at GeltVC, Niv Dror at Shrug, SterlingVC, Ali Hamed at Crossbeam, Cody Hock and Cole Hock from UpNorth, Lightshed Ventures and Bettor Capital. Notable angels also wanted in on the action, including Justin Waldron, Brud founder Trevor McFedries, Ian Borthwick, Albert Cheng, Stephen Sikes and Anthony Pompliano.
The company is launching its app on the app store with an invite-only approach, with the first invites going to content creators who already play games like Call of Duty. The long-term goal is to create content creators around wagering. “We’re trying to create a network where wagering is the engagement tool,” said Geranio.
For now, the company is only supporting bets on games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. The service acts as a marketplace which exchanges contact information on a PlayStation or Xbox. To win a wager, competitors have to link their bank accounts, settle on an amount, and 1v1Me puts that money in escrow. Gamers stream their game on Twitch and 1v1Me monitors the game to determine the winner. Once the competition is over, the winner gets the money transferred to their account.
The company is launching with gamers like NoisyButters (who invested as well), Lunchtime, RLaw and Vonniezugz.
To juice signups and invites, which can either be obtained through a creator or by following the company on Twitter, where 1v1Me will give codes away, the company is also hosting a $500 challenge to whichever competitor wins the most games at the end of the week.
“When I worked at YouTube, I met many gaming creators that desired to entertain their fans and hone their skills, but it can be a struggle to make significant money along the way,” said Albert Cheng, co-lead of Socially Financed and director of Product at Duolingo. “1v1 is the most promising platform for esports gamers to make a living, and I’m thrilled to back them on their journey.”
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Extra Crunch roundup: Coupang and Roblox debut, driving GPT-3 adoption, startup how-tos, more
Extra Crunch publishes a variety of article types, but how-tos are my favorite category.
For many entrepreneurs, the startup they are trying to get off the ground might be only the second entry on their resume. As a result, they don’t have much experience to draw from when it comes to basics like hiring, fundraising and growth marketing.
Last week, Natasha Mascarenhas interviewed experts who had some strategic advice for finding the right time to bring a product manager on board. This afternoon, we published a guest post by growth marketer Jessica Li with tips for “how nontechnical talent can build relationships with deep tech companies.”
We’ve also received great feedback on a recent guest post about bootstrapping options for SaaS founders written by a founder who’s actually done it.
Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.
If you have some startup-related “how” and “why” questions, please browse our Extra Crunch How To stories. They’re aimed squarely at early-stage founders and workers trying to solve long-term problems.
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week! I hope you have a relaxing weekend.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Welcome to Bloxburg, public investors
Image Credits: Steve Jennings / Getty Images
As Roblox began to trade Wednesday, the company’s shares shot above its reference price of $45 per share. Roblox, a gaming company aimed at children, has had a tumultuous if exciting path to the public markets.
Seeing Roblox trade so very far above its direct listing reference price and final private valuation appears to undercut the argument that this sort of debut can sort out pricing issues inherent in more traditional IPOs.
4 ways startups will drive GPT-3 adoption in 2021
Image Credits: Zastrozhnov (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Trained on trillions of words, GPT-3 is a 175-billion parameter transformer model — the third of such models released by OpenAI.
GPT-3 is remarkable in its ability to generate human-like text and responses, able to return coherent and topical emails, tweets, trivia and much more. In 2021, this technology will power the launch of a thousand new startups and applications.
There have never been more $100M+ fintech rounds than right now
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
We are in a period of all-time record investment for so-called mega-rounds, or investments of $100 million or more inside the fintech realm.
To date, Q1 2021 is ahead and is thus guaranteed to set a new record, having already bested the preceding all-time high. What’s going on?
Global-e files to go public as e-commerce startups enjoy a renaissance
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Global-e, an e-commerce platform that helps online sellers reach global consumers, filed to go public on Tuesday. Global-e’s business exploded amid the pandemic in 2020, and the company expects that the COVID-fueled shift to e-commerce will only lead to future growth.
Passive collaboration is essential to remote work’s long-term success
Image Credits: Alistair Berg (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Have you ever popped into a meeting because you overheard a snippet of a conversation and wanted to share your perspective?
That’s passive collaboration — low-friction ways to invite new ideas. But it’s only when we’re able to fully realize passive collaboration virtually that we’ll have unlocked the full potential of remote and hybrid work situations.
Dear Sophie: What are the pros and cons of the H-1B, O-1A and EB-1A?
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Dear Sophie:
I’m an entrepreneur who wants to expand my startup to the U.S. What are the benefits and drawbacks of various types of visas and green cards?
The ones I’ve heard the most about are the H-1B, O-1 and EB-1A.
— Intelligent in India
Proactive CEOs should prioritize European expansion
Image Credits: Sean Gladwell (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Many investors will encourage CEOs to remain U.S.-centric this year and perhaps expand their product offering or move into new market segments. But 95% of the world’s population lives outside the U.S., making an expansion into Europe your best growth lever.
Coupang follows Roblox to a strong first day of trading
Image Credits: Bloomberg (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
After Roblox debuted on Wednesday, Coupang followed, with shares shooting above the South Korean e-commerce giant’s IPO price range. Quick math shows Coupang is worth around $92 billion at the moment, a huge number that nearly zero companies will ever reach.
How and when to hire your first product manager
Image Credits: Francesco Carta Fotografo (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Because product managers and founders often have overlapping skill sets, it can be tricky to find the right candidate.
While it’s different for every company, hiring a PM ensures companies aren’t “chasing the shiny object” but rather building the things that create enduring value for customers.
Deep Science: AI adventures in arts and letters
Image Credits: Alashi / Getty Images (Image has been modified)
AI isn’t confined to the tech sphere; machine learning is applicable across disciplines, from music and the “computational unfolding” of ancient letters to figuring out where EV charging stations need to be built.
A first look at Coursera’s S-1 filing
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch
The SEC filing offers a glimpse into the finances of how an edtech company, accelerated by the pandemic, performed over the past year.
It paints a picture of growth, albeit one that came at steep expense.
Olo’s IPO could value the company north of $3B as Toast waits in the wings
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Olo has a history of growth and profitability, making its impending pricing all the more interesting.
But are investors willing to pay more for profits? And, if so, how much?
From electric charging to supply chain management, InMotion Ventures preps Jaguar for a sustainable future
Image Credits: Andrew Ferraro — Handout/Jaguar Racing / Getty Images
InMotion’s investment in Circulor, a company that monitors supply chains from raw material inputs to finished outputs with an eye toward sustainable sourcing, shows the firm’s dedication to backing companies across the mobility space broadly.
White-label voice assistants will win the battle for podcast discovery
Image Credits: maxkabakov (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Americans are bored, housebound and screened out, driving roughly 128 million Americans to use a voice assistant at least once a month.
This has created a golden opportunity for audio as consumers turn to podcasts, voice assistants and smart speakers.
Why I’m hitting pause on ARR-focused coverage
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
One of the first recurring features Alex Wilhelm established at Extra Crunch was the “$100M ARR Club,” ongoing coverage of startups that have reached scale.
“Forget a $1 billion valuation — $100 million in annual recurring revenue is the cool kids’ club,” he wrote in December 2019. Since then, he expanded it to cover companies that attained $50M ARR.
The concept is a useful lens for studying the market. I can say this with confidence because it’s been widely copied by other tech news outlets. But this morning, Alex surprised me — he’s shelving the ARR Club, at least for now.
“In the end it became a pre-IPO list that was fun but not entirely educational, by my reckoning,” he told me. “The $50M ARR club evolution was supposed to help shake loose more interesting operational details, but just didn’t.”
Before putting the format on hiatus, Alex’s last ARR Club roundup looks at in-office display and kiosk startup AppSpace, data backup unicorn Druva, and Synack, which makes security software.
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Coupang follows Roblox to a strong first day of trading
Another day brings another pubic debut of a multibillion dollar company that performed well out of the gate.
This time it’s Coupang, whose shares are currently up just over 46% to more than $51 after pricing at $35, $1 above the South Korean e-commerce giant’s IPO price range. Raising one’s range and then pricing above it only to see the public markets take the new equity higher is somewhat par for the course when it comes to the most successful recent debuts, to which we can add Coupang.
The company’s mix of rapid growth and slimming deficits appear to have found an audience among public money types, so let’s quickly explore the price they paid. What was the company worth at its IPO price, and what is worth now? And, of course, we’ll want to calculate revenue run rates for each figure.
Oh — we’ll also need to calculate how much money SoftBank made. Inverted J-Curve indeed!
Coupang’s IPO and current value
As Renaissance Capital notes, Coupang boosted its share allocation to 130 million shares from 120 million. This made the value of both primary and secondary shares in its public offering worth a total of $4.55 billion. That’s a lot of damn money.
At its IPO price of $35, the same source pegged the company’s fully diluted IPO valuation at $62.9 billion. By our accounting, the company’s simple valuation at its IPO price came to $60.4 billion. Those numbers are close enough that we’ll just stick with the diluted number out of kindness to the company’s fans.
Doing some quick math, Coupang is worth around $92 billion at the moment. That’s a huge number that nearly zero companies will ever reach. Some do, of course, but as a percentage of startups that start it’s an outlier figure.
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Welcome to Bloxburg, public investors
As Roblox began to trade today, the company’s shares shot above its reference price of $45 per share. Currently, Roblox is trading at $71.10 per share, up just over 60% from the reference price that it announced last night. That effort finally set a directional value of sorts on Roblox’s shares before it floated on the public markets.
Roblox, a gaming company aimed at children and powered by an internal economy and third-party development activity, has had a tumultuous if exciting path to the public markets. The company initially intended to list in a traditional IPO, but after enthusiastic market conditions sent the value of some public-offering shares higher after they began to trade, Roblox hit pause.
The former startup then raised a Series H round of capital, a $520 million investment that boosted the value of Roblox from around $4 billion to $29.5 billion. TechCrunch jokes that, far from IPOs mispricing IPOs, that $4 billion price set in early 2020 was the real theft, given where the company was valued just a year later. Sure, the pandemic was good for Roblox, but seeing a 5x repricing in four quarters was hilarious.
Regardless. At $45 per share, Roblox’s direct listing reference price, the company was worth $29.1 billion, per Renaissance Capital, an IPO-focused group. Barron’s placed the number at $29.3 billion. No matter which is closer to the truth, they were both right next to the company’s final private price.
So, the Series H investors nailed the value of Roblox, or the company merely tied its reference price to that price. Either way, we had a pretty clear Series H → direct listing reference price handoff.
The company’s performance today makes that effort appear somewhat meaningless as both prices were wildly under what traders were willing to cough up during its first day of trading; naturally, we’ll keep tabs on its price as time continues, and one day is not a trend, but seeing Roblox trade so very far above its direct listing reference price and final private valuation appears to undercut the argument that this sort of debut can sort out pricing issues inherent in more traditional IPOs.
To understand the company’s early trading activity, however, we need to understand just how well Roblox performed in Q4 2020. When we last noodled on the company’s valuation, we only had data through the third quarter of last year. Now we have data through December 31, 2020. Let’s check how much Roblox grew in that final period, and if it helps explain how the company managed that epic Series H markup.
Gaming is popular, who knew
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Epic Games buys photogrammetry software maker Capturing Reality
Epic Games is quickly becoming a more dominant force in gaming infrastructure M&A after a string of recent purchases made to bulk up their Unreal Engine developer suite. Today, the company announced that they’ve brought on the team from photogrammetry studio Capturing Reality to help the company improve how it handles 3D scans of environments and objects.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Photogrammetry involves stitching together multiple photos or laser scans to create 3D models of objects that can subsequently be exported as singular files. As the computer vision techniques have evolved to minimize manual fine-tuning and adjustments, designers have been beginning to lean more heavily on photogrammetry to import real-world environments into their games.
Using photogrammetry can help studio developers create photorealistic assets in a fraction of the time it would take to create a similar 3D asset from scratch. It can be used to quickly create 3D assets of everything from an item of clothing, to a car, to a mountain. Anything that exists in 3D space can be captured and as game consoles and GPUs grow more capable in terms of output, the level of detail that can be rendered increases as does the need to utilize more detailed 3D assets.
The Bratislava-based studio will continue operating independently even as its capabilities are integrated into Unreal. Epic announced some reductions to the pricing rates for Capturing Reality’s services, dropping the price of a perpetual license fee from nearly $18,000 to $3,750. In FAQs on the studio’s site, the company notes that they will continue to support nongaming use clients moving forward.
In 2019, Epic Games acquired Quixel, which hosted a library of photogrammetry “megascans” that developers could access.
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PUBG Mobile-developer invests $22.4 million in India’s Nodwin Gaming
Krafton, the developer of popular gaming title PUBG Mobile, has invested $22.4 million in Indian esports firm Nodwin Gaming, the two firms said Tuesday as the South Korean firm looks to maintain some presence in what was once its key overseas market.
Nodwin Gaming, a subsidiary of local gaming giant Nazara, has established itself as one of the largest esports firms in India.
The Gurgaon-headquartered firm today works with several firms, including Blizzard Entertainment, Valve, Riot Games and ESL to help them host events, provide commentary, produce and license content, and amass brands and sponsors.
Nodwin, which recently expanded to Africa, will deploy the fresh capital to accelerate its growth in international markets, it said.
Krafton and Nodwin have been engaging with one another for some time. The two firms last week announced that they will be collaborating to hold two PUBG Mobile events in Asia.
“Esports will be a key pillar to the growth of sports entertainment in the future. It sits at a wonderful intersection of sports, entertainment and technology where nations such as India can pave the path. With Krafton coming on board, we have an endorsement from the mecca of gaming and esports — South Korea — on what we are building from India for the world based on our competence in mobile first markets,” said Akshat Rathee, co-founder and managing director of Nodwin Gaming, in a statement.
India banned PUBG Mobile and hundreds of other apps with affiliation to China last year, citing cybersecurity concerns. Krafton has been attempting to bring PUBG Mobile back in India, but hasn’t had any luck yet.
To assuage New Delhi’s concerns about users’ security, Krafton said it had cut ties with Chinese publisher Tencent. (It also inked a global cloud deal with Microsoft.) Sean Hyunil Sohn, the head of Corporate Development at Krafton, said earlier this month at a gaming conference that the firm “will work hard” to bring PUBG Mobile back in India, but didn’t elaborate.
“Krafton is excited to partner with Nodwin Gaming to help foster the promising esports ecosystem and engage with our fans and players in India,” said Changhan Kim, chief executive of Krafton in a statement.
“Taking the momentum from this partnership, we will explore additional investment opportunities in the region to uphold our commitment and dedication in cultivating the local video game, esports, entertainment, and tech industries.”
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Makers of ‘kid’s first virtual world’ Animal Jam targets Gen Z teens with Fer.al debut
Before kids graduate to the expansive virtual worlds in games like Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite, they often get their start in online social gaming with a game like Animal Jam. Here, kids learn to personalize their avatar, explore a world, chat with other players and trade items in a safe environment with parental controls. Today, the company behind this popular title, WildWorks, is launching a new game, Fer.al, which builds on Animal Jam’s legacy while catering to a slightly older crowd of Gen Z teens.
“When we started talking about Fer.al, it was the idea of where do kids go when they age out of Animal Jam?,” explains Clark Stacey, co-founder and CEO of WildWorks. “Because there isn’t a transitional space between a completely walled garden like Animal Jam and … Instagram and the adult social networks and games that don’t have those same protections,” he continues.
“We knew we wanted to provide a place for these older kids to go where the walls are a little bit lower,” Stacey adds.
The new game is meant to cater to older kids — meaning young teens ages 13 to around 18 — who are now choosing their own games, have their own email address and don’t need parental permission to play. The guardrails on chat also won’t be as high on Fer.al as on Animal Jam and will focus more on preventing bullying and abuse than blocking words. Players will also be able to connect their online social accounts to their game accounts in the future.
Image Credits: WildWorks
With Fer.al, WildWorks is introducing another animal-centered title, but this time it’s moving into the fantasy realm. Players choose between bipedal humanoid creatures based on folklore and myth including a Kitsune, Senri, Dragon, Jackelope, Werewolf, Kirin or a Shinigami, with more to come in time.
The characters’ style was inspired by Animal Jam fan art, Stacey says, where kids would create animal avatars that were sort of a mix between manga, Animal Jam’s style, and other, older animation styles.
Like its predecessor, Fer.al players will also be able to personalize their character and change their appearance, design their personal space (this time, a “sanctuary” instead of a “den,”) discover a world where they can interact with other players, collect items and trade, and venture on quests. But the storyline has also evolved to reflect teens’ interests, including their growing understanding of social media and the desire to grow an online fan base.
The larger narrative involves a reality show where two warring queens, Aradia and Delilah — each with their own Instagram account, naturally — are angling for control. The company isn’t offering a lot of details as to how this narrative plays out in the long term, but it will involve weekly and monthly contests as the game ramps up, in addition to the everyday missions and quests that are undertaken to gain ingredients to create new clothes or a new “glamour” (a rendering effect that goes around your character.)
Image Credits: WildWorks
Much like Animal Jam — or even other virtual worlds like some Roblox games — players are meant to engage in cooperative gameplay to advance. There will be tasks you can’t complete on your own, meaning you’ll need to interact and chat. You will also be able to join factions, initially driven by the two queens, as the game advances.
Another notable aspect to Fer.al is that it’s largely designed to cater to girl gamers.
“It’s certainly not intended to be to the exclusion of boys who are in this age range,” explains Stacey. “But we recognize the fact that, among the most engaged Animal Jam players, it’s about 80% girls. We’ve leaned into that pretty heavily in Animal Jam — we’re trying to feature a lot of female scientists and working with them on causes that promote girls in STEM. So we know a lot of the built-in audience is coming from that,” he says.
“And I think the need that we recognized is that it’s not hard for adolescent boys to find online communities that jive with them. It’s pretty hard for girls to find the same thing. So, as we’re creating this community — everything from the rules to the visuals — we are very conscious of that. And the people that we’re going to and asking for what works for you and what doesn’t, is primarily girls,” he adds.
Image Credits: WildWorks
Building off the Animal Jam fan base has been an advantage for getting Fer.al off the ground. Today, Animal Jam has anywhere between 2.5 million to 4 million monthly active users out of a total of 135 million registered accounts. The gulf between the registered and active figures is indicative of how many kids have grown out of Animal Jam since its October 2010 launch. But Stacey admits the title has seen some decline since its peak usage, as well.
Still, there’s a lot of interest in what WildWorks does next, it seems.
Within a week of launching the Fer.al website, the game had 75,000 kids sign up to become beta testers. The testers were brought into the beta slowly, starting in April 2020, and initially on desktop only. Now, the beta version of the game sees daily actives in the low 10,000’s pre-launch. On the Apple App Store and Google Play, over 100,000 people have registered for the pre-release, as well.
Like Animal Jam, Fer.al will offer a freemium experience. But while Animal Jam generated nearly 80% of revenues through subscriptions, Fer.al will use a season pass model of monetization. Users buy the season — priced around $10 to $20 — via an in-app purchase, which will unlock unique items and experiences specific to that season. It expects to launch around seven seasons per year.
Image Credits: WildWorks
The company didn’t offer seasons until later in the beta test, but Stacey says the conversion rate was at “the high end of our expectations so far on desktop.” If the mobile conversion rates remain as high as desktop, it will be in the range to start investing in user acquisition, he says. The company may also consider ads at a later date as well as merchandise, if all goes well.
Salt Lake City-headquartered WildWorks (formerly Smart Bomb Interactive) is majority owned by Signal Peak Ventures, which has invested $20+ million into the company over the years. The company shifted in 2008 to focus on its own IP, resulting in the launch of Animal Jam and other titles.
Over the past few years, WildWorks’ revenue — largely from Animal Jam and another game, Tag with Ryan — has ranged between $20+ million to below $30 million. If Fer.al is able to successfully capture the Animal Jam graduates who are looking to move up to “older kid” gameplay, it could grow that revenue base by a sizable amount.
Fer.al is launching publicly today in all countries and will be available initially in English. It can be played on PC, Mac, iOS and Android.
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Zynga acquires Echtra, maker of Torchlight 3, to double down on RPG games
Games company Zynga has been on an acquisition tear the last several years to beef up its activity, in particular in mobile and casual-puzzle games, spending over $3 billion to pick up a range of startups across Europe (specifically Turkey and Finland) in the process. Today, however, it’s taking a turn toward more immersive, highly graphic cross-platform experiences. The company has announced that it is acquiring San Francisco’s Echtra Games, the role-playing game publisher behind Torchlight III, which is available on Steam, XBox One, PS4 and Nintendo Switch.
The team will be working on releasing a new title in partnership with Zynga’s NaturalMotion studio, the company said. No other details on that were released for now.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. It’s also not clear who backed Echtra, if anyone.
But Echtra is in some ways a classic example of a gaming startup built out of a burning idea, rather than cold, calculated moneymaking — perhaps the best kind of company you can have.
Max Schaefer, the co-founder and CEO, had previously been at Runic Games, the developer of the original Torchlight series, as well as Diablo and others. Runic was shuttered by its owner, Perfect World, and so in 2016, Schaefer went on to form a new company, Echtra, with some of his Runic colleagues and others in the industry because he saw more life left in the franchise.
That perhaps didn’t play out as well as Echtra had hoped, though. After the game exited early access into general availability, it received mixed reviews, some of the criticism leveled at how the game was built, and some because of bugs.
The plan will be to bring on Echtra’s team and expertise, potentially to continue building the franchise, but more generally to help Zynga build out more of a footprint in cross-platform games, and also gaming technology, in particular around tools built on Unreal Engine, the platform of choice at the moment for RPG and other immersive applications.
“Max and his team at Echtra Games are responsible for some of the most legendary game properties ever created, and they are experts in the action RPG genre and cross-platform development. I’m excited to welcome the Echtra Games team into the Zynga family,” said Frank Gibeau, chief executive officer of Zynga, in a statement. “This acquisition will be instrumental in growing our iconic licenses and brands from mobile to PCs and consoles, while helping to further expand Zynga’s total addressable market.”
“Echtra Games is delighted to be joining the Zynga family,” added Max Schaefer. “We share Zynga’s vision that cross-platform play is an essential part of the future of RPGs and interactive entertainment and are eager to apply our vast experience and talents to this effort.”
Gaming has been one of the bright spots in the last year — no surprise, since people are spending so much more time indoors and at home because of the pandemic. Zynga, as a consequence of that, has also been on a roll in recent times, with its fourth-quarter earnings, released last month, beating analyst expectations. Its revenues of $616 million are the highest-ever quarterly bookings posted by the company. Acquisitions are a major part of its strategy these days, the company said at the time.
Going for more immersive RPG titles outside of mobile is an ambitious and potentially more expensive undertaking and is a very notable swerve away from the company’s acquisitions in recent years, which have included a majority stake in Turkey’s Rollic for $228 million, Peak for $2.1 billion, 80% of Small Giant Games for $718 million; and Gram Games for $299 million.
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Amazon’s GameOn app, a platform for sharing mobile gaming clips, launches on iOS
Mobile gaming hasn’t seen the same demand for streaming content in the past as desktop has, but Amazon sees a market there to extend Twitch’s dominance. After launching on Android back in November, the company’s mobile streaming centric app has just launched on Apple’s App Store.
The app lets users record short clips (anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes of content) of gameplay from a variety of titles that support screen recording capture. Users can screen record these clips directly into the GameOn library at which point they can add commentary or additional edits before publishing to the GameOn platform or sharing links to the platform on other sites.
The GameOn platform is interestingly fully disconnected from Twitch with separate branding and different channels. Amazon has been partnering with streamers to wholly focus on mobile gaming while promoting challenges unique to the app.The company says the service is compatible with over 1,000 mobile games.
Developers have been increasingly vigilant about brining more full-featured ports of desktop titles to mobile though the lack of sophisticated controls has made this a challenge. As gaming platforms aim to bring cloud streaming networks to iOS there could end up being more demand for shot-on-mobile content and titles that users control with a gamepad, but this will depend on whether the App Store grows more amenable to these platforms over time.
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