This startup is helping smaller game developers take on Tencent, Garena

Gaming has always been a staple pastime for a lot of people around the globe. According to data from Statista, the video game market value worldwide has been steadily increasing over the past decade and is expected to push to US$200.8 billion in the next two years from US$159.3 billion last year.

According to Newzoo, Southeast Asia generated game revenues of US$4.4 billion in 2019, up 16% year on year. Mobile gaming contributes over 70% of that amount, the report noted, as roughly 80% of Southeast Asia’s gaming population play on their phones.

It comes as no surprise then that a lot of companies are looking to capitalize on this growth. However, the mobile gaming industry is currently dominated by global giants like Tencent, King, Supercell, and Garena, making it a tough industry to penetrate for a smaller company, Vikas Gulati, the founder and CEO of Singapore gaming startup Jambox Games, tells Tech in Asia.

Jambox’s core team / Photo credit: Jambox Games

Not all fun and games

“The top 1% of game publishers and developers make over 90% of all the revenue and downloads in gaming. Most indie game developers in Asia struggle to scale their games and compete against global incumbents,” he adds.

To help give smaller game developers a fighting chance, Gulati and his team formed Jambox Games, an independent competitive game-publishing platform for casual and hyper casual games. The company has recently raised US$1.1 million in a seed round led by gaming and venture studio investor Ludus to further realize this goal.

Gulati founded Jambox Games in 2020 after serving as global performance head and managing director for mobile advertising platform AdColony, previously Opera Mediaworks, in Asia Pacific. He also served as the vice president of Vserv for Southeast Asia as well as vice president for marketing and business development for travel search engine Sprice in Asia Pacific.

Now, he leads a team of eight people, which he aims to more than double in the next two to three months.

Since the establishment of Jambox Games, the team has been working to help indie gaming firms acquire, grow, retain, and reward users and monetize their products. The startup also aims to offer a suite of tools to help developers add a multiplayer competitive aspect to their games to drive better engagement and present more opportunities for monetization.

The company partners with game developers to help launch and grow their games on a profit-sharing model, allowing developers to focus on game design while Jambox Games takes care of user acquisition and monetization. “Jambox wins only when our developer partners win with their games,” says Gulati.

The game plan to take on global giants

In its first year of operations, it aims to reach over 1.5 million daily active users, launching between 10 to 15 game titles from the region in 2021 through its platform.