If you’re a mobile game developer, Soomla wants to help you make money

Everyone can agree that the fundamental definition of gaming changed with the launch of the iPhone in 2007. Not only did this new medium provide a level playing field for all, it also helped shift consumer preferences. People could now play games directly on their smartphones whenever they had free time. Dreary subway commutes would no longer spark existential crises. Banal meetings could be livened up with Angry Birds. The portability of the device made games appealing to a wide spectrum of users.

Before the disruption of the gaming industry, the market catered primarily to ‘hardcore’ gamers who preferred playing on consoles or PCs. Developing games for this segment was expensive, time-consuming, and required large teams of developers and designers. Now, the near-ubiquity of smartphones and tablets means there’s a bigger focus on ‘casual’ gamers and smaller, independent companies are able to compete with the established players.

The shift to mobile also made it necessary for developers to come up with novel ways to monetize this segment. In the past, publishers would simply release a title for a fixed cost and hope consumers would catch on. They tried this approach on mobile, but it didn’t work. A wave of indie game developers swept tons of free games into app stores, and users preferred to download those instead.

The freemium model, which means games are free to download but publishers use in-app purchases to monetize, started to gain popularity. However, not everyone was nimble enough to accept this change and some struggled to come to terms with it.

“We were observing the mobile gaming market in 2012 when the scene was exploding and in-app purchases had become the leading way to monetize,” explains Gur Dotan, co-founder of Soomla. Soomla is an open-source startup that’s trying to help game developers monetize more efficiently. “There was a paradigm shift [in the industry]. A lot of developers didn’t know how to digest this.”

Early days

Tel Aviv-based Soomla was founded by Yaniv Nizan, Refael Dakar, and Gur Dotan. “I knew Yaniv from my previous job in advertising. A couple of years back he approached me and said ‘I’m quitting the company because I have an idea for a new startup. Are you interested in joining?” Gur recalls.

Soon after resigning, the three founders began work on the new venture. The premise behind Soomla was to build a virtual economy engine for game developers, which would help them ascertain the features to monetize. “Kind of like a customizable UI,” he says.

Gur says the struggle for game developers to adapt to mobile was real. The whole aspect of in-app purchases was constantly re-engineered as developers toyed with different tactics in an effort to understand what clicked. Each studio would have its own team, trying to implement its own strategy, designing different virtual economies. “It was a big inefficiency that we observed.”

It took Soomla approximately four months from concept to building a minimum viable product. One of the things the startup promoted from day one was a commitment to open source philosophy. “Refael and I are both engineers and passionate about open source. We want to expose all our technology, at least the parts we can afford to expose, and make it publicly available on GitHub. We want to encourage collaboration between developers on the technology,” Gur explains.

Bootstrapping and lead generation

Pivoting to a data company

What’s next?