Social Distribution

A Paradigm Shift in Mobile Distribution

Social Distribution: The video game distribution market is broken. With most of the focus on “walled gardens” and fee structures, the larger problem of cost effective and scalable distribution is left unaddressed. Distribution is currently dominated by advertising, when it should be primarily driven by social circles. User acquisition (UA) in gaming, especially when it comes to mobile, should not only be about who has the most ad spend. We think your social circles should be more intertwined with the games you choose to play. The people you interact with on various social platforms should also be the people you engage with through games.

While Game Pigeon laid the foundation, we felt that innovation slowed in this category when it should have powered on and focused on what made those games viral and asked “what’s next?.” Here’s what we observed:

1. Messengers today can support not only asynchronous experience but also synchronous experiences directly in the app without the need to download a separate app.
2. The infrastructure and tools for messenger games don’t invite developers to build.
3. No one has cracked cross-messenger games.

This is why we recently led a $1.3M seed round into Quicksave. Quicksave is building the engine, infrastructure, and distribution platform to support immersive, social, instant games across all messenger platforms.

Messengers are the new app store: Messenger platforms have the largest audiences on mobile and most people have more than one messenger on their device. Apps like WhatsApp are also expanding outside of just messaging, with WhatsApp Business, as they take inspiration from WeChat and look to extend their platform. To continue to expand their offerings, a lot of these apps are offering integrated HTML5 games to further monetize and engage users. Players are able to connect easily with friends and play together through messenger applications.

Messenger apps have become a core part of the mobile experience. They are used by individuals all over the globe to talk to each other on different operating systems and even without cellular data. This has made them widely popular and many of the messenger incumbents are leveraged by hundreds of millions of people every month; making them the most social of any platform.

With the proliferation of messengers leveraging other business models, games are going to quickly become part of that ecosystem as well. This will be better for developers as payments directly in the game will not be tied to the platform but instead will be in “webview” and exempt from app store fees.

We’re thrilled to find such a fantastic team in Quicksave who are building a technology solution and game engine to address this market. Great things ahead.