Twin Galaxies wants to scale its competitive gaming platform into an advertising business, and Enduring Games is buying into the vision.
Enduring Games’ primary focus is game development, with the studio collecting co-development credits on titles like Borderlands 4, Bugsnax, and ARK: Survival Ascended since its formation in 2019. Today, July 31, the company announced its newest venture: an investment in the competitive gaming platform and organization Twin Galaxies.
Enduring Games founder and studio head Adam Creighton declined to share specific numbers pertaining to the value of the investment deal and Enduring Games’ stake in Twin Galaxies, but described the agreement as a “cash investment” that is part of a broader ongoing fundraise for Twin Galaxies.
“The amount was secondary to having the right partners involved early, so the discussions probably took a little longer than they normally would for a cash investment of this kind,” Creighton said in an interview with GamesBeat. “We were trying to figure out how to use this as a positive signal to the kinds of folks in the industry that we want involved in this thing.”
In addition to Enduring Games’ investment, Creighton has joined Twin Galaxies as a formal advisor. He said the relationship between Enduring Games and Twin Galaxies would create new opportunities for the latter to leverage the former’s strong relationships with prominent game makers.
“It also lets us socialize the platform with our partners that we do co-development for — those very large publishers and developers — and say, ‘hey, here’s another value-add that we have,’” Creighton said.
Founded in 1981 as an organization dedicated to tracking and verifying competitive gaming records and achievements, Twin Galaxies has evolved in recent years to become an online platform that generates revenue in part by offering game publishers and brands access to a highly engaged competitive gaming audience. Now, the company is seeking more investors to help scale up this part of its business.
“Twin Galaxies, as an organization, has existed for over 40 years. It’s one of the very few things in gaming that has lasted and withstood,” said Twin Galaxies chief executive officer Jace Hall in an interview with GamesBeat. “Adam, [Twin Galaxies senior executive] Zachary [Rozga], and I all believe that there are industry people who recognize the significance of that, and could contribute and be part of what this mission is.”
In May, Twin Galaxies partnered with Warner Bros. Discovery to run a promotional competition in support of the release of the “Mortal Kombat II” movie, with the company reporting a 73-percent increase in Mortal Kombat players during the period of the competition. Rozga told GamesBeat that he believed his company’s relationship with Enduring Games could allow it to offer development services for more in-depth in-game integrations in the future.
“There are specific things in-game that would make for awesome Twin Galaxies challenges — that aren’t native to the game, but could be native to the game,” he said.
Although Enduring Games’ deal with Twin Galaxies represents its first strategic equity investment in another company, it isn’t the studio’s first time using some of the cash in its war chest to get more skin in the game in another company’s venture. The company is also an investor in Sacred: Last Pixel of Ancaria, which Enduring Games is co-developing with SparklingBit.
“We’re also moving into publishing; some of that is ourselves, and some of it is with other publishers as they white-label in either direction,” Creighton said. “But this creates another opportunity that adds to the overall value in all directions.”