TWIG 143: Reactions to Tilting Point raising $235M

so let's talk something that we understand a little bit better a tilting point raising 235 million to fuel expansion acquisition so this is the the first ever equity financing it was led by general atlantic a leading global growth equity firm with participants from strategic investors like red ventures and camaro they will use the investment to accelerate its progressive tilting point will use the investment to accelerate its progressive publishing model by signing more developers in life publishing co-developing more titles acquiring more studios and partnering with developers and top ip launches the company currently has more than 40 developer partners meaning that these are companies that they're scaling their games through ua they're fun by by funding ua and managing it or doing app store optimization for them doing atmonization platform deployment and more then they team up with the existing partners to deepen their relationship through co-development and later m a tilde more has offices in seoul st petersburg kiev barcelona new york san diego and that swanky new location in miami and

especially like in the end of this this article there they talked about tilt moines plans to accelerate its m a strategy all right well the caveat in the beginning really like the tilting point guys looking forward for samir the their co-ceo to join the podcast next month as we we've discussed so i'm trying to you know as always read news objectively using sensor tower any public data to analyze this so to my view tillingbone has exactly the same strategy as scopely but they just haven't found the hit games and hit studios yet so what i mean by that is both of the companies are pretty much of the same age both are publisher publishers that have evolved to co-development then to acquiring studios when they find the success and this is basically them them acquiring a co-development studio is smart approach to negating the issues of live ops being sandbagged due to the revenue sharing and so forth and so forth it's just better to acquire the other developer continue with the live ops and then everybody has the same goal as of today these both of the companies are pretty much same same age tilde point has

roughly is roughly of the same size as scopely was in mid 2015. on the other hand scope lee's revenues since then have grown 20 times so sculley makes 20 times more revenue per month today than it does in 2015 and tilting point makes the same amount of money that that's the scope we did in 2015. and when it comes to games guys i just want you to guess what is the biggest scope league game in terms of cumulative revenue eric kress make a guess star trek game star trek all right very close so star trek is their second largest net revenue at 440 million dollars yahtzee has till date made about 200 million in in net revenue but we don't know what the amount of ad revenue is it could be much actually larger than that their biggest game till date is marvel strike force it's cur it's past half a half a billion in net revenues

now can you guess what is the biggest game from tilting point in cumulative revenue actually that's 3d match 3d okay i i can't even find it here eric crest do you know any tilting point games not really that's part of the problem all right so tilting points and this is not a knock on so tilting points biggest game till date is narcos cartel wars it's sort of like a clash of clans version with narcos ip pretty fun game it has made about 40 million according to sensor tower and net revenue so significantly smaller and star trek timelines is their other top game like it's pretty much neck and neck with narcos and when you compare the the star trek from tilting point that's about 40 million in lifetime net revenues and then scopely has a star trek game that is 440 million in lifetime revenue so i'm just i'm not trying to knock on tilting point here and in fact what i'm trying to do the opposite i think they have a very solid

strategy i have they have great people and now they have the funding to to go with it so they can be more aggressive and they can start closing more of these solid ips and acquiring solid studios to execute on this these ips in fact i really think that with the strategy they've chosen they will probably have 20xed their run rate in three years i really do believe because i think the strategy that scopely has employed is very smart and i think tilting point has all the elements to employ the same strategy and yeah so i'll i'll take the i'll take the the super under on that one but i'm trying to paint a picture that tilting point is like scopely was way back but now they're they're following the same strategy and because they've seen the the successes and the failures i hear you but but it was a different it was a different time back then you could pick up these studios for peanuts right relative to what you're paying for them today and 200 million or whatever they raise that's not a lot of money

to like scale up a business in this in this day and age you know when valuations are out of control right i don't know school is possible studios for 50 just now oh but those are mice nuts right those are tiny right so yeah no so we should we'll see i mean they peaked at like five million a month at according to sensor tower and then they're down to about three million a month so that run rate's pretty pretty low and they have like they say they only have like 200 employees but i imagine or 180 but i imagine most of them the people that would we would be publishing partners i suppose i don't know but most of their games make 200 to 500 000 a month that's just really tiny right so we'll see what they can do i don't know any of these guys but i i would be interested in talking to see what the what what the kind of the expectations are and what their plans are to find these diamonds in the rough that that haven't been picked over by every other company in the world well chris i want to say like the the approach that scope he has and now tilting point has i really like it because

you build the internal genre expertise by by you know hiring the top people and in certain extent and then when you're trying to find a studio you're really trying to find a studio that can execute on building a game in a certain genre like you don't have to find a studio that can execute on running these insane live ops like when you consider star trek or yahtzee studio like these studios weren't killing it before before starting work with scopely but scopely kind of leveled them up with their own expertise in live ops with their own expertise in in product management and platform so forth and the studios that they work with were good at building a game like a game but there's but what there's no evidence that tilting point has that capability that way scopely did does right like they have they don't have any games that have made any money right like it's like you know it's they they that's a long it's a it's a long road it's a long road but i think they're on the right road so anyways i

i'm i'm eager to to to get samir again back on the podcast and discuss their strategy super do you have any any take on tilting point suffered high level thoughts on tilting point are that you know its reputation has has really sort of improved i think in the last like three years what's pretty much tilting point is like it it's gone through kind of like three iterations it started out as like a premium label almost they were publishing um kind of paid games and just like really high quality aaa artisanal games um iteration is like they have a big kind of and i don't i don't know maybe they're in a fourth iteration at this point but like the third iteration was like they built out like a kind of ua uh infrastructure and they were doing almost like agency work and then they had like service levels that were priced on that basis like so if you're we're just your agency where's your agency and you pay for the ua then we charge this much if we if we're the

agency and we pay for the aua then it's it's a little bit more and then if we're the agency and we pay for ua and we help you with all this live stuff to improve the title then it's this much and it's look more like an official and i think that makes a lot of sense and i think the way that tilting point kind of sits in the market now is they're kind of like a premier destination for a company that just wants to make a game right if they don't really have any you know if they don't really have any intention of like or ambition to like publish the game themselves until they find a really great place to land and i don't think that was always the case i feel like clothing points in a good position and i feel like there can only be like one or two of these companies and maybe it's just scope and tilting point but like those companies seem like the best position to like fill that role of like hey you don't want to publish your own game but you're really great at making games let us help you bring all of this like the meat of free to play in the meat of games as a service to your title and we'll do all the ua for you and

we've established expertise as that and and you know we're now we're very well capitalized to be very big as they've proven they can do so i feel like you know i'm happy for them smear's a good guy i've known him and i think they're going to be pretty successful