free-to-play
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Enver Turned VR Chaos Into a Distribution Strategy
The studio behind Scary Baboon and MotoX discovered that in social VR, the clip is not marketing for the game. The clip is part of the game.
Scopely Spent Seven Years Learning How to Roll the Dice - Then Built a $6 Billion Hit
The first Monopoly concept did not work. Seven years, a full reset and more than $1 billion in marketing later, Scopely had a mobile phenomenon - and a playbook for buying the rest of the board.
The Startup That Put a Live TV Game Show Inside Your Bingo App
Most bingo apps are you, alone, tapping a screen. Live Play Mobile added a person on the other end - a real host, live, 24/7 - and turned a card game into appointment television you carry in your pocket.
Bagelcode Lost Two Publishers - Here Is the Global Games Playbook It Built Instead
A failed puzzle game, two vanished publishing deals and one strangely popular in-game slot pushed five Korean developers toward a different kind of studio. Bagelcode’s real product is not merely mobile games - it is a system for learning what players will return to.
Two Riot Vets Bet $49M That a Game Could Feel Like Church
They left Riot to make an online world that welcomed the people MMOs usually scare off. Palia found 10 million of them - and still cost the founders the studio.
The Ukrainian Game Studio That Turned a Flash-Era Farm Into a 15-Year Survival Strategy
QS Games began with an online farm, survived the death of Flash and rebuilt its catalog for phones. Now the Ukrainian studio is using the machinery behind five million players to court indie developers as a publisher.
DoubleDown Interactive
The Seattle-born social casino pioneer has spent 16 years selling the feeling of a casino without a cash-out. Its next wager is less visible but more consequential: own more of the checkout, broaden into Europe and make an old hit travel further.
Nexon America
Nexon America helped teach the West that a game could be free, social and never quite finished. Two decades later, its real product is not any single title - it is the difficult craft of keeping a digital world worth returning to.
FunCraft
FunCraft is a remote-first mobile game studio founded in 2019 by former Electronic Arts and Zynga veterans. It builds friendly word and puzzle games - led by flagship title Wordgrams and Word Yatzy - designed to become daily rituals players return to for years. The studio backs a philosophy it calls 'casual forever,' pairing rigorous live operations and ad-spend experimentation with a small, senior team. By its fifth year it had crossed 7 million installs and more than $15 million in revenue.
ZOOT
ZOOT is a New York-based sweepstakes gaming platform that brings video-game sensibilities to iGaming. Instead of slots and table games, it builds proprietary arcade titles - Crash, Plinko, Mines, Dice and sports-themed variants - playable free with Gold Coins or, via a sweepstakes model, with Sweeps Coins that can be redeemed for cash prizes. Founded by gaming veterans Sean Ryan (ex-Facebook games, OpenWager) and John Cahill (ex-Sega, Yahoo Games), ZOOT raised a $6M seed in June 2025 led by CoinFund with Griffin Gaming Partners, aiming to fold stablecoin payments into gaming and expand from the U.S. to markets across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Monsarrat - Can You Come Out to Play?
Monsarrat is a Los Angeles-based augmented reality game studio building what it calls the world's first Outdoor RPG. Founded by Johnny Monsarrat - who co-founded Turbine, one of the first MMO companies, later sold to Warner Bros. for $160M - the studio's demo game Landing Party spreads an entire fantasy world across any real-world park or open space instead of pinning one creature to a GPS point. Backed by seven-plus patents, a ~12-person team, and an advisory board of former PlayStation, Blizzard, Niantic, and Lucasfilm executives, Monsarrat pitches outdoor gaming as an antidote to a loneliness epidemic - a reason to walk outside and play.
Michael Martinez
Michael Martinez is the CEO and co-founder of FunCraft, a San Francisco-based mobile game studio he launched in 2019 with longtime collaborator Jason McGuirk. A Zynga and Electronic Arts veteran who previously founded Juicebox Games, Martinez built FunCraft around a deliberately unglamorous bet: making casual word and puzzle games that become daily rituals rather than chasing trends. With a fully remote team of roughly 15-21 people, the studio crossed 7 million installs and more than $15 million in revenue in its first five years on the strength of titles like Wordgrams, Word Yatzy and Merge Kingdoms. Martinez is a vocal skeptic of gaming hype cycles, publicly stepping back from Web3 with the line that blockchain was 'a solution in search of a problem,' and an evangelist for testing everything and embracing the unsexy.
World Golf Tour
World Golf Tour (WGT) is a San Francisco-based video game company behind WGT Golf, one of the most realistic free-to-play online golf games. Using patented 3D photorealistic georeferencing built from helicopter-shot, high-definition imagery, WGT recreates real-world courses like Pebble Beach, St Andrews and Bethpage Black to within roughly an inch of vertical accuracy. Launched in open beta in 2008, it grew to tens of millions of players across browser, iOS and Android, ran virtual versions of the U.S. Open with the USGA, was acquired by Topgolf in 2016, and spun back out as an independent studio on January 1, 2025.
LILA Games
LILA Games is a Bengaluru-based mobile game studio founded in 2020 and building Project Black, an ambitious free-to-play extraction shooter for mobile. Backed by a $10M Series A from Rainfall, KRAFTON, Sequoia, BITKRAFT, and Galaxy Interactive, the team is led by former SEGA and FunPlus operators determined to prove India can ship a globally competitive shooter.
Pocket Gems
Pocket Gems is a San Francisco mobile-games studio behind hits like War Dragons and Episode - Choose Your Story. Founded in 2009 by Daniel Terry and Harlan Crystal above a pizza shop while Terry was still at Stanford, the company builds AAA-quality mobile games and a Hollywood-grade interactive storytelling platform, powered by its proprietary mobile-first Mantis Engine and backed by Sequoia Capital and Tencent.
Ben Liu
Ben Liu is the CEO of Pocket Gems, a San Francisco-based mobile entertainment company backed by Tencent and Sequoia Capital. After joining as COO in 2011 and becoming CEO in 2012, he has led the company's flagship titles — the interactive storytelling platform Episode (with 25 million+ registered creators) and the real-time 3D strategy game War Dragons — while overseeing $155 million in total fundraising, mostly from Tencent. A Stanford double-degree and MBA graduate, Liu brings a rare hybrid background spanning investment banking, Disney strategy, EA mobile product management, and social gaming before betting on the mobile-first future of entertainment.
Joseph Kim
Joseph Kim is the CEO and co-founder of LILA Games, a venture-backed mobile game studio headquartered in Bengaluru, India, building Project Black - an ambitious free-to-play extraction shooter for mobile. With a career spanning two decades across Gaia Interactive, FunPlus (King of Avalon), Demiurge Studios, SEGA Networks, and NBCUniversal, Kim brings rare publishing-to-studio expertise to one of gaming's most competitive genres. Backed by $12.8M from BITKRAFT Ventures and top gaming angels, he's on a mission to prove India can be the next great hub for world-class game development.
Michael Dawson
Michael Dawson is the Chief Business Officer and Head of Storytelling Studio at Pocket Gems, the San Francisco mobile gaming studio behind Episode and War Dragons. With a background spanning management consulting, clean-tech startups, and entrepreneurship, Dawson joined Pocket Gems in 2011 and helped scale it into one of the most successful mobile entertainment companies in the world — overseeing products that have been downloaded over 325 million times and platforms where billions of story episodes have been read. He holds degrees from Yale (Ethics, Politics & Economics) and Stanford (MBA, MS in Environment & Resources), and has become one of the sharper strategic voices in mobile interactive storytelling.