Tilting Point raises $235M for user acquisition for mobile games

Tilting Point has raised $235 million to fuel its business enterprise of acquiring customers for absolutely free-to-play mobile games.

That’s a massive round and a vote of self-confidence for Tilting Point‘s “progressive publishing model,” mentioned Kevin Segalla, co-CEO of the New York firm in an interview with GamesBeat.

Tilting Point ordinarily engages with game developers by supplying them with user-acquisition budgets. It can borrow up to $132 million per year in its line of credit, and it has utilised that cash to fuel marketing for games from developers who have shown a lot of guarantee. As the game grows its revenues, it shares the proceeds from the development. That enables the firm to work with developers who are currently seeing good development, rather than attempting to choose the winners from a substantially bigger field of little developers.

If the relationship operates out properly, then Tilting Point can make an investment in the game studio and enable it get its next game off the ground. (Sometimes it does not work out, as was the case with Third Time, maker of Photo Finish Horse Racing, an early consumer that saw initial results and then slowed down. That firm sooner or later filed for bankruptcy protection).

But Segalla noted that the firm has deep relationships with 40 developers with present campaigns. And sooner or later, if points progress to the highest level, Tilting Point will at times obtain the developers. The firm has acquired firms such as Gondola, Star Trek Timelines (the game and its developers, from Disruptor Beam), FTX Games, and Plamee.

“We’ve been working really diligently to build a great company,” mentioned Segalla. “We’ve done that bootstrapping the company. We haven’t taken any outside investment up until this investment. And we felt that that now is the right time for us to do that, and really accelerate all the things that we’ve been doing and doing successfully.”

The funding

General Atlantic, a development equity firm, led the round with participation from strategic investor Red Ventures and Kamerra. The firm will use the investment to accelerate its progressive publishing model by signing more developers in live publishing, co-building more titles, acquiring more studios and partnering with developers on leading intellectual house launches.

Anton Levy, co-president of General Atlantic, mentioned in a statement that Tilting Point has pioneered the progressive publishing model and grow to be a higher-development business enterprise with lots of possibilities.

“This investment is really about taking what we’ve been doing really well, and doing it at a larger scale,” Segalla mentioned. “It’s about signing more developers into live publishing deals. It’s about doing more co-development. And it’s about acquiring some of the studios that we’ve been partnering with along the way, which has been a great model for us.”

Tilting Point will also leverage the funding to continue to expand across geographies, platforms and audiences. Besides user-acquisition funding, the firm also handles app retailer optimization (ASO), ad monetization, platform deployment and more.

“This funding is going to help us accelerate our progressive publishing model where we work with games that are already on the market and  we accelerate them and amplify them,” Agili mentioned. “We have built our entire company finding ways to amplify existing games and making existing developers more successful. And as we end going from dating to getting married, as we get to know them, we progress into a deeper progressive publishing partnership that makes sense for them.”

As for the funding atmosphere, it is great. Segalla mentioned that the firm did properly by waiting to get a round of funding till the industry favored thriving game corporations.

“That’s made us a much stronger company,” Segalla mentioned.

Art or science?

I asked if it was art or science. Agili mentioned that the firm is information driven and it has a scientific method to scaling games and analyzing the information for performing the very best user acquisition. This has helped games grow to be more predictable, and make superior revenues more than a longer period of time than the days when games had been hit-driven companies. In turn, that has made investors more comfy with investing in game corporations, and that in element has led us to the present post-pandemic gaming boom.

“We see our work as de-risking free-to-play mobile game investment,” Agili mentioned. “We get to be very good at predicting game performance.”

Segalla mentioned that the investment neighborhood now recognizes there are models for effectively investing in games.

“Investors have finally taken note of this across the game industry,” Segalla mentioned.

The approaches have been place to the test for the duration of the present iOS industry, exactly where Apple has prioritized privacy more than targeted advertisements.

“We’re seeing impacts across the board that is quite varied,” Agili mentioned. “Some games are much more impacted than others. The games that are impacted are usually more niche and are looking for very specific target audience of high spenders. We have the advantage of being very agnostic to genres and we work on many games. We are lucky enough that overall it doesn’t affect us much.”

More development

With this new financing, Tilting Point aims to additional expand its worldwide attain by increasing in strategic international markets like South Korea and China. With offices in Seoul, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Barcelona, New York, San Diego, and a new place opening in Miami, the firm desires to attract leading talent and serve the exclusive demands of new partners worldwide.

Tilting Point is currently moving to new platforms, such as cloud-based Facebook Gaming and Nintendo Switch, bringing games to wherever players are. The firm has grown to more than 200 staff, and it was founded in 2012.

“The magic here is that you build this over time, and you start with a relationship that is really focused on very specific, impactful results, which is user acquisition and refining the game,” Agili mentioned. “And you eventually go into deeper things like building a game together. And ultimately, after the amount of time, a few months to a few years, you decide to partner up and do a real acquisition. So actually, the trust is built along the way through to real expertise and real results.”

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz