Why the NextBeat team is joining the gamified learning revolution at Duolingo

It was just earlier this year that NextBeat span-off from Supercell-owned Space Ape, headed up by co-founders Simon Hade, Olly Barnes, and Joe Adams.

That move came after the Clash of Clans maker had acquired the remaining stake in the Space Ape and eventually folded it into the newly born Supercell London.

Now just months after forming a new company, the majority of the team at NextBeat, which operates games like Beatstar and Country Star, has been bought by learning platform Duolingo.

23 staff from the studio will establish the firm’s first official presence in the UK and will focus on building Duolingo’s Music course along with a small existing team. Some developers will remain at Beatstar and will continue operating its games.

Duolingo's chief business officer Bob Meese says the deal is a "strategic bet on talent". The aim: to utilise their experience in mobile gaming and music to make its own music course and entire platform "more delightful, immersive, and effective".

A new beat

Speaking to PocketGamer.biz, now former NextBeat CEO Simon Hade says the company was in the middle of raising a funding round before the opportunity with Duolingo arose.

“It wasn’t the plan for us to sell for sure,” he states.

“But what happened as the rubber was hitting the road of the NextBeat plans and we were really getting honest with ourselves with what we're trying to do, we started to see a lot of headwinds. And we wanted to make games and apps that reach a lot of people.

“We were very interested in getting out of the games vertical and into education and other apps … and we got talking to Duolingo and we just realised over the course of the conversation that there's a much better platform for us to have impact with their 47.7 million DAUs.

“... Having that as a platform to launch these features just ended up making a lot more sense to us than going alone.”

Elaborating on those headwinds, Hade admits that launching a new app or product in 2025 is “really hard”, even despite the studio’s access to capital, licensed music and games.

“In our roles here at Duolingo, we're working on a music feature. We don't need to worry about distribution, we just need to to make a product that's good and engaging. We don't need to be thinking about the monetisation model because Duolingo's mission is much more about reaching lots of people and engagement, and it's all behind a single subscription.

“So that unlocks a lot more pure game design. We can just think about making the app fun and engaging and not have to worry about the other commercial aspects that are getting harder and harder when you’re making and launching games.”

Games-inspired

For Duolingo, the acquisition of a games team is part of its long-term plan to make learning fun. The company has had representatives at a number of big games conferences and late last year recruited former Microsoft corporate VP and head of the Halo franchise Bonnie Ross as an independent board member.

It’s expanded from being a language learning platform to other categories like maths and music - the latter of which the company says has already engaged with millions of players in beta.

Hade notes that Beatstar was more of an app experience than a Clash Royale. The acquisition is the culmination of its direction to explore the intersection between music and gaming. Former NextBeat CCO Olly Barnes tells PocketGamer.biz that the team is keen to explore music education and hopes to draw the entertainment factor from learning.

Hade says Duolingo’s charm comes from the fun factor: the character, engagement and leaderboards. He remarks that it’s almost a bit nostalgic - with making a fun experience in Duolingo’s sandbox like going back to making games before worrying about the free-to-play UA, LTV and ROI grind.

He adds one of the first blockers to the deal was the potential lack in variety of content like the team has had in the more traditional games world. But after discussions, they saw more similarities than differences with their work.

“What we’ve been doing over the last 10 years in free-to-play gaming, the bar for complexity of a base product is getting bigger and bigger,” explains Hade. “And what Duolingo’s design team has done really well is really capturing the essence of these mechanics and making them very accessible and very simple.”

Table stakes

Asked if there are more opportunities for growth now in non-gaming versus the games market, Hade says the challenges very different.

He explains the power of having massive legacy IP is “becoming almost table stakes”, along with the requirement of complicated systems honed and built over multiple products.

“I think it's just harder and more expensive than ever to launch new free-to-play mobile games products.”

He adds: “There’s just a different set of challenges. What these apps that are becoming more gamey have is they have these extrinsic motivations already built in, whether that’s exercise or learning a language.

“Games don’t have that, so games have to create a need. And with however many millions of games that have been launched over 10 years, it’s very hard to find a really compelling new need, so you’ve just got to work harder at creating the demand.”