Homa Games raises $50M to beef up its hypercasual mobile game factory

Game publisher and developer Homa Games has raised $50 million to accelerate its “factory” for constructing hypercasual mobile games.

This Paris-based game factory has seen a stellar development income considering that inception, with more than 500 million installs. The enterprise has hired more than one hundred individuals from 20 nationalities in the last 18 months and it has opened 5 offices in 4 nations.

Northzone led the round with participation of Singular, King and FuboTV founders as small business angels and Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s family workplace.

Back in February, Homa Games raised $15 million, and so it has now raised $65 million to date. The publisher and developer currently has more than 40 apps and games in its portfolio. The category of hypercasual games — which are lightweight games that you can play in a minute — is a hot one. The enterprise is launching two to 3 games a month.

Since its founding in 2018, Homa Games began with hypercasual and it has now expanded to casual and board games. It has launched hits such as Tower Color, Sky Roller, and Nerf: Epic Pranks. The latter game was the company’s initially licensed game in collaboration with Hasbro. The largest games at the moment are Kaiju Run, Get Lucky, FarmLand, and Craft Island.

“There is a lot of competition in gaming in general but this industry is not a ‘winner takes all,’” stated CEO Daniel Nathan in an e-mail to GamesBeat. “We don’t focus on hypercasual as such, we focus on building a tech platform on top of game engines to master market intelligence, feature A/B testing without code and massive distribution. We have launched hypercasual games but also domino and minesweepers. We are creating a new generation of tech for game creators so they have intelligence on top of the game engines.”

Combining in-property made tech and its personal inventive studio, Homa Games offers central services to its studio partners with a focus on automation and optimization at every single step of app production and publishing. Homa Games develops games internally, and it also partners with 200 external studios worldwide.

Nathan founded his initially iPhone game enterprise at the age of 18, and he went on to generate other corporations in media and entertainment. Juan José Mostazo is chief technologies officer and a veteran of various startups in major information, scalable systems, and adtech. Chief income officer Olivier Le Bas worked at Dailymotion and one more startup.

The enterprise has focused on industry intelligence and testing with its Homa Lab group, so it only invests in tips that have a prospective. It iterates on the prototypes till the games are fantastic. And then it tries to attain huge audiences by means of distribution. In our earlier interview, Nathan stated it can take as small as 3 days for the enterprise to test regardless of whether an notion will work or not.

Homa Games has created tech infrastructure that permitted it to shorten the game development substantially — most of the company’s published games have been constructed in significantly less than eight days, although they all reached the major 20 most downloaded games in the app retailers.

Homa’s technologies is a layer on major of cross-platform game engines like Unity which makes it possible for any game developer to have access to the tools that significant game studios have constructed in-property and unlock their creativity. This infrastructure is based on 3 principal pillars: industry intelligence (which enable developers uncover the next trends and have access to the most promising game tips), actual-time A/B testing capabilities with their no code computer software development kit (SDK, which makes it possible for huge A/B tests in parallel), and distribution and monetization technologies.

The enterprise partners with indie game studios offering them with a complete stack of developer tools, information insights, and income generation by way of marketing that they wouldn’t be in a position to access without having the platform. Most of the games produce income for more than a year.

Commenting on the deal, Riccardo Zacconi, founder of King, stated in a statement, “Daniel and Olivier have an ambitious vision and I was blown away by the groundbreaking production technology Homa Games have built to empower developers. Their technology is giving independent game developers the toolkit to maximize their time as they make content creation easy and extremely data-driven. They’ve been able to hire a stellar team to build this further and I’m extremely happy to be on board.”

Homa Games is preparing to employ one hundred individuals in the next 12 months to execute on its tech vision, total strategic acquisitions, and companion with brands such as Hasbro. Homa Games has published games across various categories such as hypercasual, casual, and board, and expects to launch about 20 more prior to the finish of 2021.

Since Apple shifted its focus to privacy more than targeted marketing, a lot of game developers have had problems targeting precise audiences for monetization. But considering that Homa Games audience is incredibly broad and it does not have to target customers so precisely, it hasn’t seen considerably impact on iOS, Natahn stated. Still, it has a lot of competitors.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz