Mobile game developer builds up infrastructure to sell its games and decides to start offering those resources to outside studios as a publisher. We’ve seen this story before. It’s an arms race between publishers to see who can offer the biggest pool of monthly active users to smaller studios that might produce the next big game.
This time it’s casual developer Dragonplay expanding into publishing. The company first plans to bring match-3 role-playing puzzler Gun N’ Blade to Western markets. Internally, Dragonplay internal developers produce a series of social casino titles like Live Hold’em Poker and Slot City that are very successful.
“With the huge number of apps available on the market and the difficulty in discovery, there is a need for publishers that have the knowledge, audience, and funds to deliver content to a mass market of players,” Dragonplay chief executive Sharon Tal told GamesBeat. “Dragonplay will continue to be a leader in the Social Casino Games category on mobile platforms while Dragonplay Casual will focus on high-quality casual games with proven monetization and social models.”
Gun N’ Blade is already live in Korea, where it attracted over 100,000 players after a few weeks on the iOS and Google Play markets.
For Dragonplay, the transition to publisher is a natural evolution of the framework it built out to support its own games.
“Our motivation for going into publishing, in addition to our in-house gaming development, is to leverage our strengths and experience in cross-promoting, monetization and product analytics,” said Tal.
Dragonplay’s casino titles are often in the top 100 highest-grossing mobile games on both the iOS and Android stores. As successful as it is, Dragonplay did the math and realized it could generate a significant amount of additional revenue by helping outside developers find users for their games.
Mobile developers are looking to build up the number of players that use their services. That’s how these companies thrive. By the end of 2013, we’ll have a better idea how many of these mobile publishers the market can support. For now, everyone wants to try to take the title of “mobile gaming’s Activision.”