Playnomics Raises $5M In Second Round To Help Mobile Game Makers Monetize

Playnomics, a San Francisco-based startup that helps mobile game developers earn more from their existing players, just picked up another $5 million in funding from Vanedge Capital and existing investors including FirstMark Capital and XSeed Capital. Vanedge is a Vancouver-based fund co-created by a couple Electronic Arts veterans including former president of worldwide studios Paul Lee. The firm’s principal Tony Lam will join Playnomics board. Playnomics is competing in an increasingly crowded space of app service providers that help game developers earn more revenue from their players. The startup’s product marries analytics with the ability to act on data. Game developers get a special dashboard which segments out players into groups of high-spenders, or whales — all the way down to those that are at risk of leaving. With that data, game makers can change their messaging to lure at-risk players back into a game or prompt others to jump on special deals. “Studios can go in and track the health of their games based on scores,” said Playnomics’ VP of Business Partnerships, Ian Atkinson. “We score every player in the game based on retention and engagement.” Playnomics’ analytics look at attention, or the number of sessions per player and the length between play sessions. It looks at loyalty, or whether the gamer has come back in the last week, and then intensity, or how active they are while playing. The initial price to use their system is free and with that, a studio gets up to 1 million messages to players. Beyond that, there are custom pricing plans depending on how many player segments the studio wants or how many messages they want to send. The company’s network has about 50 developers, 30 million monthly active users and 100 million uniques overall. There are about 100 games on the platform, including some from Turkey’s Peak Games. For comparison, another competitor Playhaven, which also focuses on retention and monetization of mobile gamers, has about 100 million uniques in its network. Chartboost, another gaming-centric, cross-promotion network, has about 12,000 games on its platform. The 20-person startup had raised $3 million before that round from FirstMark Capital, XSeed Capital, TriplePoint Capital, Accelerator Ventures and Metamorphic Ventures.

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