game-monetization
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The Checkout Company Trying to Give Game Makers Their Store Back
Apple, Google and Steam made game distribution easy - and expensive. Xsolla built a 20-year business around the awkward alternative: helping studios sell directly, get paid locally and keep the player relationship.
Overwolf Burned Its Cash Building Every Gaming Tool. Then It Let Everyone Else Build Them.
The Tel Aviv company nearly died trying to be a Swiss-army knife for gamers. Its second act was simpler: give modders and app makers the tools, audience and advertising to build the missing pieces themselves.
Tianyin Zhang
Tianyin Zhang is the founder and CEO of DreamCraft Entertainment, a Redwood City-based startup building a code-free platform that lets anyone create, publish, and monetize video games without programming or art skills. A former Google engineer and game programmer, he co-founded DreamCraft in 2018 with Veronica Yao out of Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch. The company has raised more than $15 million, including a $10 million Series A in November 2021 led by March Capital, with backing from Makers Fund, Tencent, and Hiro Capital. DreamCraft's mission is to make game creation roughly ten times easier and to open game development to hobbyists, modders, and first-time creators.
Christian Facey
Christian Facey is the co-founder and CEO of Audiomob, the London-based company that built the first non-intrusive audio advertising platform for mobile games. A former Google agency strategist and Facebook marketing science partner, he combined his advertising background with hobbies in game development and hip hop/jazz production to spot a gap: the mobile gaming and audio ad industries had never been connected. He launched Audiomob in 2020 with co-founder Wilfrid Obeng, raised a $14M Series A at a valuation north of $110M, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021.
Audiomob
Audiomob is a London-founded adtech company that pioneered non-intrusive audio advertising inside mobile games. Its SDK lets game developers earn revenue by playing short audio ads without interrupting gameplay, while advertisers reach a large, hard-to-access mobile gaming audience. Founded in 2020 by ex-Google and ex-Facebook engineers Christian Facey and Wilfrid Obeng, the company reaches hundreds of millions of monthly players across 160 countries and has raised roughly $16 million, including a $14 million Series A at a $110 million valuation.
DreamCraft Entertainment, Inc.
DreamCraft Entertainment is a San Mateo-based startup building a code-free game creation platform that lets anyone design, publish, and monetize video games without programming or art skills. Its game editor handles the heavy technical lifting - multiplayer, cross-platform support, performance and memory management - while bundling a library of casual and cartoon-style art assets, so creators can focus on gameplay. Founded in 2018 by Tianyin Zhang and Veronica Yao and backed by Y Combinator, Tencent, Makers Fund and March Gaming, the company raised a $10M Series A in 2021 to democratize game development.
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.
Jake Brooks
Jake Brooks is the co-founder and co-CEO of Triumph, a San Francisco company that gives mobile game developers a drop-in SDK to add real-money, skill-based tournaments to their games. He dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build it, and in 2023 the company launched with $14.1M in seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst. Triumph handles the hard parts - payments, KYC, anti-fraud, matchmaking and state-by-state compliance - so developers can monetize beyond ads. Brooks pitches real-money competition as a third pillar of game revenue alongside advertising and in-app purchases.
Triumph
Triumph (Triumph Labs) is a San Francisco company that turns ordinary mobile games into real-money skill tournaments. Its plug-and-play SDK lets developers add cash competitions with a single line of code, while Triumph handles the hard parts behind the scenes: payments, KYC identity checks, state-by-state legal compliance, geolocation, matchmaking, anti-cheat, and payouts. Founded in 2021 by Stanford dropouts Jake Brooks and Jared Geller, the company raised $14.1M (a $10.2M Series A led by General Catalyst plus a $3.9M seed) and also runs its own consumer apps - Triumph Arcade for skill games and Rips for card collectibles.
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.