Tilting Point
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Tilting Point acquires FTX Games and Plamee Studios’ assets
Game publisher Tilting Point announced today that it has made its third acquisition in eight months, buying games, key employees and “most of the assets” from FTX Games and Plamee Studios — both previously owned by Playtech, which will be focusing on its gaming and sports betting software moving forward.
Plamee previously developed Narcos: Cartel Wars, which has supposedly made $60 million in revenue since launch. FTX published Cartel Wars, as well as The Walking Dead: Free Casino Slots and Criminal Minds: The Mobile Game. Tilting Point has taken over operations for all three FTX titles, as well as a fourth that’s currently in development.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Last fall, Tilting Point acquired Gondola, a startup that optimizes in-game offers and ads. Then it purchased the mobile game Star Trek Timelines earlier this year, hiring the development team to form a new gaming studio called Wicked Realm Games in the process.
CEO Kevin Segalla said he’s always seen acquisitions as a big part of the company’s “progressive publishing” model, in which the company is first hired to help developers with user acquisition and then develops a deeper business relationship over time.
“We were built to ultimately be in a position where we could acquire some of the studios that we’re working with,” Segalla said.
He added that he expects “more acquisitions down the pike for sure,” with Tilting Point particularly interested in acquiring games that have previously been “constrained in marketing spend” and “clearly are going to have longer legs.”
It sounds like studios acquired by Tilting Point continue to operate with a degree of independence while drawing on the larger company’s resources to grow and monetize their games.
“We truly value the developers’ independence,” Segalla said. “We specifically want to work to continue operating their business and help them accelerate their growth. A lot of development studios are recognizing that scale is becoming more and more important.”
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Tilting Point acquires mobile game Star Trek Timelines
Tilting Point announced this morning that it has acquired Star Trek Timelines, a free-to-play character collection game, from the game’s developer Disruptor Beam. It has also hired Disruptor Beam team members to create a new studio, Wicked Realm Games.
This follows Disruptor Beam‘s shuttering of its other titles, Game of Thrones Ascent and The Walking Dead: March to War. Moving forward, the company says it will be focused on its Disruptor Engine tools for mobile game development and operations.
Tilting Point, meanwhile, had previously acquired the game Languinis and the monetization startup Gondola, but President Samir El Agili told me that this is the first time the company has acquired both a game and the development team behind it. CEO Kevin Segalla described this as an extension of Tilting Point’s “progressive publishing” model, where the company first works with developers on user acquisition, then develops a deeper business relationship over time.
In fact, Timelines — which Tilting Point says has been downloaded 8 million times and earned over $100 million — was one of the first games supported by the company’s user acquisition fund. And through those efforts, the Tilting Point team came to believe that there’s still plenty of opportunity for growth.
“We spent a good amount of time over the past year-and-a-half to two years helping the team scale the game to success, helping them bring a user to the game using our ability to do user acquisition, as well as improving the game itself in terms of our operations,” El Agili said. “What we have seen over this time is that Star Trek Timelines is a very impressive game, its users are very sticky.”
He noted that Tilting Point is increasing the size of the team working on Timelines from nine at Disruptor Beam to 19 at Wicked Realm Games, which will be led by Disruptor Beam’s former CTO David Cham.
The studio, El Agili said, will be “100% integrated from a financial standpoint, but they’re still going to be very independent in the way they operate.” And while Wicked Realm will be focused on Timelines for the near future, there are “more ideas that we can build with them.”
Segalla also said that as a result of the deal, Tilting Point is essentially becoming the first Disruptor Engine customer.
“Tilting Point has been a great partner to us and have proven that they care about the game and its community and there’s no one better to take Star Trek Timelines to the next level,” said Disruptor Beam CEO Jon Radoff in a statement. “We are also excited that Tilting Point will be one of our first live customers for our live-ops technology and that we will be continuing our working relationship.”
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Tilting Point acquires game monetization startup Gondola
Tilting Point announced yesterday that it has acquired Gondola, a company that aims to increase game monetization by optimizing in-game offers and video ads.
Tilting Point CEO Kevin Segalla described his company’s model as “progressive publishing” — usually, mobile game developers start working with Tilting Point because they need help with user acquisition, and then develop a deeper publishing relationship over time.
“With a select group of our development partners, we’ll acquire an IP, and we’ll … have them take the engine that they already have and create a whole new game,” Segalla said. “It’s really a dual effort between us and the developer.”
To accomplish all this, the company has built artificial intelligence tools to improve user acquisition. But the other side of that equation, in Segalla’s view, is increasing the lifetime value of the users acquired.
“At the end of the day, scaling a game boils down to two simple things, [cost per install] and LTV,” he said. “Strong developers are working to improve the LTV of their players, but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that with the right toolset you can use to improve the lifetime values. That’s what Gondola is about … We’ve been following for years, and we said, ‘Let’s bring this in-house.’ ”
Gondola currently offers four modules: Target Optimization (choosing the best offer for a player), Rewarded Video Ad Optimization (choosing the right amount of virtual currency to reward a player for watching a video ad), Store Optimization (choosing the right store items to show a player) and Currency Optimization (choosing the best virtual currency amounts for offers and promotions).
The financial terms of the acquisition — Tilting Point’s first — were not disclosed. As part of the deal, Gondola CTO André Cohen is joining Tilting Point as its head of data science, while his co-founder and CEO Niklas Herriger remains involved as an executive advisor.
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Tilting Point expands its user acquisition fund to $132M in annual spending
Mobile games publisher and marketer Tilting Point is dramatically increasing its commitment to its user acquisition fund.
The company announced a $12 million fund at the end of 2016, which it said would help developers grow their games while remaining independent. Today it revealed that it’s committing $132 million in annual spending to the fund.
CEO Kevin Segalla said that as mobile app stores become more and more crowded, “user acquisition has gotten incredibly complicated,” so most indie developers “don’t have the tech and the expertise to do it.”
That’s where Tilting Point comes in. President Samir El Agili said the company has built “machine learning technology to maximize and optimize user acquisition.” It likes to work on games that are at the “crossroads,” taking a solid game with a sustainable business model, then dramatically accelerating its growth with advertising.
The initial fund led to partnerships on Disruptor Beam’s Star Trek Timelines and Nukebox Studios’ Food Truck Chef.
Segalla said that given the fund’s success, the question became, “How can we do this at a much larger scale?” which led to the much larger fund commitment, thanks to capital committed by CFC Capital (Tilting Point’s majority shareholder) and Metropolitan Partners Group.
Just to be clear, the $132 million isn’t a price tag that Tilting Point is putting on its own services, and instead represents money that will actually be spent on advertising.
Segalla argued that the deals are structured in a way where Tilting Point’s incentives are properly aligned with the developer’s.
“This is not a loan that we’re giving them, it’s not something where we’re looking for equity, there’s no ongoing revenue share,” he said. Instead, the company is betting that the spending will pay off in its relationship with developer and the resulting fees: “What we’re doing is risking our own capital because we believe in our marketing, our tech and our team.”
Tilting Point says it’s open to partnering with developers in any genre, and is also looking to work with developers internationally. Segalla predicted that fund could allow Tilting Point to work with 20 new games each year, though El Agili noted that the exact number will depend on the games: “The truth is, if get two to three games that do extremely well right away, we can start spending a lot of money.”
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