Mobile Gaming Startup Homa Games Raises $50 Million

A French mobile gaming company, Voodoo, has some news just days after it acquired Beach Bum. Northzone is leading a Series A round of $50 million for Homa Games. The company acts as a publisher and partners with indie gaming studios.

Singular, King and Daniel Ek, founders of FuboTV, are also investors in today’s financing round. This Series A round is being raised by the company seven months after raised its seed round (led Eurazeo and Headline).

The company claimed that it had generated 250 million downloads in February 2021. This number has doubled since the startup now has 500 million downloads.

Homa Games is a specialist in board, hypercasual and casual games. This segment of mobile gaming requires a technology-driven, methodical approach. It has its own tech stack to optimize the performance of every game.

Unity can be used to create a prototype for game developers and send it to Homa Games. Homa Games will then test each prototype to determine if it is worth further exploration.

This startup developed an SDK that allows developers to optimize their mobile games through analytics and A/B tests. It is hoped that this will make it a more profitable venture. They can track and improve key metrics such as retention, cost of acquisition and session time. This will result in a higher average revenue per user.

Homa Games publishes the game in the App Store and Play Store. To generate revenue, it heavily relies on advertising.

It's not necessary to spend months, or even years crafting the perfect mobile game. The current state of hypercasual mobile game development means that game developers must focus on one concept that will make it easy to launch the game over and over again. Homa Games was able to reach the top 20 most downloaded apps in both the App Store and Play Store in just eight days.

Their platform allows independent game developers and entrepreneurs to access publishing, analytics, marketing tools and other resources to be competitive with large game studios around the globe. "Daniel and Oliver bring not only a vision, but also a killer execution that is helping to define and build a new category within gaming," Northzone's Par Jorgen Parson stated in a statement.

The company has already released 40 games. Homa Games is increasing the pace of its releases, with 20 games due to be released before 2021.

The company is currently working on a sub-genre for hypercasual games. This is the "arcade idle" category, according to Homa Games. It features a stickman character with no texture that allows you to move around the digital world, just like in other hypercasual games. Similar to idle games, players must gather resources to increase wealth or unlock new levels.

This is how it looks in Craft Island, Farm Land and Harvest It.

The blog entry states that the company intends to monetize these games via interstitial ads and in-app purchases, as well as subscriptions. You can also opt to see an ad faster.

Although I'm not sure if this innovation should be celebrated, it is clear that mobile gaming has a lot more business potential than ever before. Homa Games appears well-positioned to be an important publisher.

Although many hardcore gamers can not stand the idea of mobile gaming, there is no question that casual gamers can't get enough of it. As the industry becomes more mainstream, we will continue to see mobile gaming startups raise significant funds for projects that are unlikely to be beloved by critics but will certainly be a massive success financially. The only people that lose in these situations are those with a real love of gaming.