A studio built on the games nobody brags about
Ask most game founders what they are building and you will hear about the metaverse, or a battle royale, or whatever genre is currently on fire. Ask Michael Martinez and he will tell you about a turn-based crossword game your aunt plays with her coffee. That is the whole pitch. That is also why it works.
Martinez is the CEO and co-founder of FunCraft, a San Francisco studio he started in 2019 with Jason McGuirk, his co-founder from a previous company. Their thesis was almost contrarian in its plainness: make casual games that become daily rituals, the kind of thing people reach for the way they reach for a crossword or a cup of tea. No hype, no shortcuts, no trying to out-spend the giants. FunCraft calls the philosophy "Casual Forever" - a challenging but satisfying activity wrapped in progression and social systems that keep players coming back for months, sometimes years.
The numbers suggest the quiet approach has teeth. By its fifth birthday, FunCraft had crossed 7 million installs and more than $15 million in revenue, all from a fully remote team of roughly fifteen people. Its flagship, Wordgrams, anchors a small catalog that includes Word Yatzy and Merge Kingdoms. Word Yatzy, a newer release, has been outpacing the flagship on several metrics - the kind of pleasant surprise Martinez says happens precisely because the studio tests everything.
Embrace the unsexy to succeed is a sound strategy for any startup.
The long road to overnight patience
Martinez did not arrive at this point by accident. He has spent more than fifteen years in mobile games, starting at Zynga in 2009 as a product manager during the social-gaming gold rush. He went on to found Juicebox Games, where he shipped titles like HonorBound and StormBorn, then served as a Studio GM at Electronic Arts through the late 2010s. By the time he started FunCraft, he had seen enough cycles to know which ones were real.
That experience shows up in how he talks about ambition. "Just like with planting trees," he likes to say, "the best time to start a gaming company is twenty years ago - the second best time is now." It is the line of someone who knows he is not the first to the table and has decided it does not matter. The incumbents - King, Playrix, the usual names - have war chests and user-acquisition machinery FunCraft will never match. So Martinez simply refuses to fight them on their terms.
We don't want to go head-to-head with big giants whose sophistication with UA, segmentation and player payback windows totally overwhelms our own.
Test everything, even the things you're sure about
If there is a religion at FunCraft, it is measurement. The studio has run more than 300 return-on-ad-spend experiments to find pockets of profitable growth, and the discipline extends to the games themselves. Martinez insists that every feature gets tested before it ships - including the ones the team is confident about. The point is not paranoia. The point is that confidence is a poor substitute for data, and the data keeps surprising them.
It is also a discipline about restraint. FunCraft does not pile on features for the sake of a roadmap. "We don't want to clutter our game with features that don't move the needle and add to ongoing maintenance costs and unneeded complexity," Martinez says. In an industry addicted to the next mechanic, that is close to heresy. It is also how a fifteen-person team competes with companies a hundred times its size.
The man who stayed home during the gold rush
In 2022, when the rest of the games industry was sprinting toward Web3 and blockchain, Martinez did something unusual. He stayed put. He has admitted it was not entirely comfortable. "Everyone was talking about blockchain games," he recalled, "and I did feel like a bit of a dinosaur, like, 'Oh my gosh, we're missing out.'" But he had played the games. He never got hooked. And the math never closed - the user counts were tiny, the NFT buyers tinier still.
So he said so, publicly and bluntly: Web3, in his telling, was "another solution in search of a problem." When the speculative tide went out, the inflated numbers went with it, and the dinosaur looked a lot like a realist. His verdict on the whole episode doubles as his life philosophy: there are no shortcuts. You have to do the hard work of building an audience.
The Web3 skepticism is not an isolated grudge. Martinez tends to treat the industry's recurring obsessions - blockchain, VR, AR, and now AI - as hype cycles that mostly lack genuine consumer demand. He will grant the occasional exception; Pokemon GO, he allows, actually delivered on the promise. But he is allergic to the idea that a new technology automatically creates a better game. The promise of owning your investment in a game, he concedes, makes sense intellectually. It just never translated into anyone he knew getting hooked.
Why word games, and why now
The choice of genre was not nostalgia. Word games sit in a large, durable market alongside heavyweights like Words With Friends and Wordscapes, and Martinez saw room that the incumbents had left on the table. His insight was to borrow from the parts of mobile gaming that keep players engaged for years - the metagame layers, the social hooks, the long-term goals - and graft them onto a format that had largely stayed simple. "We wanted to take some of these metagame and social features and apply them to word games," he has explained. "We feel we can better serve word game players by giving them deeper goals and reasons to keep playing."
That is the engine under Wordgrams, a turn-based crossword game, and the reason a newer title like Word Yatzy could quietly outpace the flagship on several metrics. FunCraft is not trying to reinvent the word game. It is trying to give a beloved, slightly underserved format the depth and stickiness that the rest of the industry reserves for flashier genres - and to do it for an audience that will happily show up every day if the world is worth visiting.
There are no shortcuts. You have to do the hard work of building an audience.
Who actually plays
Here is the detail that explains FunCraft better than any deck: roughly 70% of its players are women, mostly between 25 and 55. That is the audience much of the games industry quietly ignores while chasing teenage thumbs. Martinez built a company around them instead, and word games turned out to be the perfect vehicle - familiar, social, and endlessly replayable when you wrap them in goals and community.
His ambition is not domination. It is hospitality. He talks about building "happy worlds that are a joy to visit," places people return to because the experience is genuinely pleasant, not because a notification guilt-trips them back. The bet is that FunCraft can pioneer a category - the way Peak revitalized match-3 - that bigger studios will only think to chase two or three years later. By then, Martinez intends to already be there, profitably, with a team still small enough to know each other's names.
He raised about $1.8 million to start, led by Play Ventures, with angel money from Zynga founder Marc Pincus - a quiet endorsement from one of the people who arguably invented the genre Martinez is now refining. It is a fitting circle for a founder who keeps choosing the patient road. Plant the tree. Water it. Let the loud people chase the weather. The word game will still be there tomorrow morning, and so will the people playing it.