Finance

Until ad networks raise their game and figure out how to use the financial information widely available to them to evaluate credit risk in a much more dynamic way, structural inefficiencies in the ecosystem will continue to persist. This hurts not only their own ads business, but also curtails the growth of app and game publishers and their ability to maximize the opportunities available to them using paid UA channels.

Accounts Receivable (AR) credit facilities are a popular financing tool for mobile apps and gaming companies. But when founders and CFOs are considering whether to seek a facility from a bank or a non-bank lender, the devil is in the detail of how they work. Read on for the pros and cons of each.

This explainer video walks you through our ROAS, LTV, and Cashflow Calculator for free-to-play mobile games. The calculator is available on our website. It's totally free to use, and will help you to model your investment formula and unit economics for user acquisition.

There can be great advantages to a strategy of keeping things simple and standardizing on USD as a base currency. It allows a greater clarity of thinking without having to constantly think about FX risk and other operational parameters.

Clean room accounting can be a very helpful way for growing studios to think about and account for their UA/monetization cycles. It doesn’t make much sense until a game or app is coming out of soft launch into a scale up phase. That said, studios hoping to scale should definitely consider this approach ahead of time.

Mobile gaming studios are pretty unique in the way they typically don’t hire a CFO or finance lead role until much later in the lifecycle of the company than most technology companies. But when they do, it's important to hire someone who has the right knowledge so they can hit the ground running. Having the right CFO on the team is an essential part of the management mix of a successful studio.

VC funding for hot mobile gaming studios is very competitive and a big-money game. Let’s look at the implications of this trend from both perspectives - VCs (and that of their LPs) and also studio founders.

Games with lifetime values (LTV) measured over months or years is where the industry is heading. But in creating games with much longer LTV periods (think Candy Crush and the like), the associated user acquisition (UA) costs to scale such a game also rise dramatically.

In this episode of The Hive, we caught up with the Co-Founder of Viker, Dan Beasley, to ask the million-dollar question — How do you fuel the UA machine that brings in valuable users for your blockbuster IP?

Cyprus is an increasingly popular location for developers to incorporate their app and gaming business with an EU location and well-established infrastructure for operating a tech business. For developers with studios based in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other CIS countries it’s one of the most popular choices for incorporation and operating their company from. In this guest post by Vasilis Patsalides of Michalis Avraam & Partners, we explore some of the key things to think about when considering incorporating in Cyprus.

Revenue-based finance (RBF) has seen a strong increase over the last 24 months and is becoming an increasingly popular funding option for certain types of tech companies as an alternative to VC funding.

Pollen VC, the leading provider of debt financing to app and game developers, has launched a new initiative aimed at improving the financial literacy of developers.

Revenue based lending is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to raising additional equity at a company's growth stage. However, the problem with revenue based finance is that it is inherently paradoxical.

What sort of preflight checks do you need to go through when looking to launch a new game? During a Pocket Gamer #4 panel, our CEO and co-founder, Martin Macmillan talked to three experts about what to look for and the questions to ask.

Mobile gaming companies have had a lot to deal with in 2020 — for better or worse. From increased downloads to decreased in-app spending, Mobile Gaming CFO Insights host Peggy Anne Salz is exploring the challenges of 2020 in this new series, starting with Adam Banks of Viker. CFOs are the people charged with financial control and planning in their organizations, balancing the need to grow with the right way to fund it, and they have a lot to teach us. 

Hyper casual games are hugely popular among users of all age groups. However, while some hyper casual developers have experienced considerable success, their ability to achieve full scale is often hampered by a lack of funding and having to wait for payouts by advertising networks before reinvesting back into user acquisition (UA).

Mobile games have never been hotter! In April 2020, mobile gaming ad revenue grew by nearly 60% and new research by Fluent Pulse found that 81% of people in the United States started playing games while in quarantine. As mobile games big and small become hot commodities, some developers will inevitably be looking to strike while the iron is hot and sell their gaming companies to acquirers hungry for acquisitions.

Aside from the development team, app companies tend to have two clear groups that are critical to their success: the finance and marketing teams. While these two functions have historically been divided into all types of company and sector, in the field of apps there is a strong imperative to bring them together to work more closely together on a daily basis.