Danish mobile gaming start-up Multiscription has announced their securing of a new round of funding for their Unleashd mobile gaming subscription service. This latest round amounted to roughly $1.6m and was led by Sisu Game Ventures, with additional investment from Tigrim and the Danish Growth Fund.
Co-founder and CEO of Multiscription, Teis Mikkelsen, said of their plans off the back of this round “This new funding is a great vote of confidence in our work to show mobile game publishers that there is an alternative to existing monetization models. It will help us scale up our team and technology and enhance our in-game monetisation design capabilities, a service we provide to our publisher partners to create the best subscription offers.”
Avoid the ads
Multiscription’s decision to expand and the subsequent investment from Sisu Games Ventures indicates faith in their business model. That being a relatively simple service, where developers can integrate Unleashd’s subscription into their game, allowing players to pay a monthly fee to Unleashd and avoid ads, receive exclusive rewards and other perks when playing games in their catalogue. Ideally, allowing both Multiscription and developers to gain a healthy revenue share.
In many ways the model resembles game streaming, in the sense of paying a set amount to access games. However, Multiscription is unique in that it seeks to do so for existing mobile games played natively to a player’s phone. Not only that, but although it is compatible with premium games, free to play games are also a prominent feature of their service. Multiscription are therefore angling for an audience already invested in the existing kind of mobile games played by many, rather than those looking for a console-like experience.
It seems that Multiscription are banking on the potential value-proposition of a wide catalogue, rather than other options such as paying within a single game to avoid ads. It’s unclear what sort of cut developers get or how these calculations are made, but the assumption would be that Multiscription hopes for widespread adoption amongst players to make the potential revenue share an attractive proposition to developers.
With other companies, such as Frameplay, competing to offer new means of advertising within games that try not to impact a player’s experience, it seems increasingly clear the mobile gaming industry is coming to grapple with advertising in games and monetisation as a whole. Multiscription seems to have investor faith in its subscription model, but it’s whether it can win over devs that will prove important, as a diverse and expansive catalogue will be key to bringing players.
