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Photo credit: Pixabay

Mobile games publisher GoGame has secured a significant investment from video games stalwart Sega through its Sega Networks mobile games division.

Founded in July by Singapore-based games industry veteran David Ng, GoGame wants to be the go-to place for mobile game developers who want a publishing partner for their title. So far, so vanilla. But GoGame’s proposition, GoPlay, is structured rather like a mobile game itself. GoGame offers a “freemium” way for game studios who need help with all stages of publishing their product.

GoPlay allows developers to pick and choose the services they need for their game. A simple drag-n-drop interface allows them to customize the offering as required. GoPlay lets developers publish for free, but additional products provide services like marketing, analytics, customer acquisition, community management, payment systems, and so on, at a price.

GoGame also offers more traditional games publishing schemes, where the publisher takes care of all the details of selling a game and shares the revenue with the developer.

“It’s not enough to just make a good mobile game,” says David in a statement. “Success requires marketing, analytics, customer management, customer acquisition, localization, and many other essential but laborious processes to be in place – which can be very daunting for new game makers. We have developed a system which manages all these processes for the game developers through a self-service model so that they can focus on what they do best – making awesome games.”

The “multi-million dollar” investment (the amount is undisclosed) gives GoGame access to Sega’s resources and expertise, not least the company’s Noah Pass, a cross-promotional advertising network that boasts 100 million users in Japan and involves a number of Japanese gaming heavyweights like Capcom and Square Enix.

State of play

David was formerly head of Gumi Asia’s Singapore arm, responsible for localizing the Japanese company’s hit game Brave Frontier and snapping up the development deal for Disney’s Big Hero 6: Bot Fight. Gumi itself didn’t have a stellar 2015, in Japan at least. The company IPO’d in March to a concerning JPY 600 million (US$5 million) loss for fiscal 2014, and announced the laying off of 100 staff in its Japan operations a few weeks later.

The mobile games market in Japan grew to a record US$9.6 billion in 2014, a four percent year-on-year growth, with mobile gaming claiming a big part of the credit for this – a stunning 18 percent growth year-on-year. Southeast Asia is the next great opportunity in this space, with mobile game revenue in the region estimated to go over US$7 billion by 2019, according to international consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. India, meanwhile, hopes to break through US$571 million in mobile game revenue by 2016.

Japan’s early-stage venture capital Incubate Fund also took part in this investment into the young Singaporean company.

We have reached out to GoGame for more details and we will update this story when we hear back.

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