A French mobile gaming company, Beach Bum, has announced its acquisition by Voodoo just days ago. Northzone is leading a Series A round of $50 million for Homa Games. The company acts as a publisher and partners with indie gaming studios.
Singular, King and the FuboTV founders, Daniel Eks family offices, are also investors in today's round. This Series A round is being raised by the company seven months after it raised its seed round, which was led by Headline and Eurazeo.
The company claimed that it had generated 250 million downloads in February 2021. This number has doubled since the startup now has 500 million downloads.
Homa Games is a specialist in board, hypercasual and casual games. This segment of mobile gaming requires a technology-driven, methodical approach. It has its own tech stack to optimize the performance of every game.
Unity can be used to create a prototype for game developers and send it to Homa Games. Homa Games will then test each prototype to determine if it is worth further exploration.
Startup has created an SDK that allows developers to optimize mobile games through analytics and A/B tests. This will help them make it a profitable venture. They can track and improve key metrics such as industry cost of acquisition and retention, and session times. This will result in a higher average revenue per user.
Homa Games publishes the game in the App Store and Play Store. To generate revenue, it heavily relies on advertising.
It's not necessary to spend months and years crafting the perfect mobile game. The current state of hypercasual mobile game development means that game developers must focus on one concept that will make it easy to launch the game over and over again. Homa Games's success in the App Store and Play Store was due to its eight-day development time.
The platform allows independent game studios and game entrepreneurs to access publishing, analytics, marketing tools and other resources to be competitive with large game studios around the globe. Northzones PrJrgen Prson stated that Oliver and Daniel not only bring a vision, but also a great execution, which is helping them to define and build a new category in gaming.
The company has already released 40 games. Homa Games is increasing the pace of its releases, with 20 games due to be released before 2021.
The company is currently working on a sub-genre for hypercasual games. This is the arcade idle category, according to Homa Games. It features a stickman-like character with no texture that allows you to move around the digital world. Similar to idle games, players must gather resources to increase wealth or unlock new levels.
This is how it looks in Craft Island, Farm Land and Harvest It.
The company's blog states that it plans to monetize these games via interstitial ads and in-app purchases, as well as subscriptions. You can also opt to see an ad faster.
Although I don't know if this innovation should be celebrated or not, it is clear that mobile gaming has a lot more business potential than ever before. Homa Games appears well-positioned to be an important publisher.
