ScoreSpace raised $525,000 in its initial funding round for a game-jam powered studio on Discord Activities.
F4 Fund and Sisu Ventures led the funding for the New York-based game studio. The round also included strategic investors from across games and media, including Stephane Kurgan (former COO of King), Jordan Bentley (founder of Hypland), Mikaël Wornoo (founder of TechWolf), and David Evans (co-founder of Playcanvas, acquired by Snap).
Khaalid Booker (KB) is the solo founder of ScoreSpace, a game studio built on years of experience with game jams.
Game jams are fast-paced competitions where developers create a game around a theme in just 48 to 72 hours. At the age of 12, Booker began entering game jams as a way to challenge himself and improve his game development skills.
By his first year of college, he advanced this passion by creating a 72-hour online jam focused on games with high-score mechanics. The top three submissions then advanced to a second stage, where streamers played them live to battle for the best scores. This format not only gave developers exposure but also the kind of real-time feedback that is often hard to come by early in a game’s life.
“I started ScoreSpace because I saw an opportunity to create a new game jam format that encouraged streamers to play the games made in the competition,” said Booker, founder of ScoreSpace, in a statement. “As a game developer, early validation is hard to come by without a community. My goal from the start was to provide that missing piece for participants.”
Khaalid, now 25, has expanded ScoreSpace into the world’s biggest monthly online game jam, regularly seeing 100+ new game entries per month.
The company’s debut title, Blackjack, was released in June and sourced directly from one of its game jam events and is currently averaging 1.2 million monthly active users on Discord Activities. Discord doesn’t have a formal relationship with ScoreSpace, but in a message Booker said he built a relationship with their team directly over time.
Discord Activities is a new instant games platform built on top of Discord. It allows you to embed web games directly inside of the Discord application that are playable on desktop or mobile. This allows users to play and share games with each other without leaving the Discord application.
About 75% of games made for ScoreSpace’s game jam event are web games so this was a perfect fit, Booker said. This allows the company to sign the best games and test them directly with Discord’s growing audience without much additional effort.
“There are thousands of games made yearly in these events, and until now they have been completely overlooked. Our deep relationships with the game developer community, combined with Discord’s unique distribution channel, give us a scalable advantage to identify and grow hits faster than anyone else,” said Booker.
“ScoreSpace is pioneering a powerful approach to game development by leveraging Discord’s unique distribution and community,” said David Kaye, partner at F4 Fund, in a statement. “Their model for rapid game validation and cross-promotion mirrors the disruptive strategies that propelled companies like Zynga and Voodoo to massive scale.”
In the same way Voodoo leveraged rapid prototyping to find billion-dollar hits, ScoreSpace functions as a platform that sources hundreds of games from its monthly jams, pressure-tests them with Discord’s social graph, and scales only the titles with the strongest early traction.
With this initial funding, ScoreSpace plans to expand its team, increase the reach of its game jam events, and build a connected platform of titles to bolster its distribution efforts.