The Challenge
When scaling hit games, Ducky found they could quickly max out their existing credit facilities. They required funding that gave them fast access to additional capital in order to pay down their ad network credit facilities and continue to spend in the all important scale up phase.
Alisher recalls the drawbacks involved in trying to scale new hyper casual games: “When a new game starts to scale, it requires a lot of marketing budget. In the first month, the marketing budget becomes particularly huge - averaging at $50,000 per platform, per day. We invest in future revenues obtained from players watching ads within our game. To receive the revenue earned depends on the partners we work with and their terms. So for the first few months, while UA investment is high, we needed a way to bridge the gap between funding UA and receiving earned revenues.”
In addition, in the hyper casual genre, there is heightened competition amongst similar games with a short window of opportunity to get it right. “There are a lot of developers watching for market trends and they are ready to clone games or create something similar. This means we have to compete against the speed of production; there is not a lot of time to do this as games become less and less compelling for the ad networks to be marketable,” says Alisher.
Time is of the essence to make hyper casual games profitable hits. It was important for Ducky to seek additional funding that could pay out quickly during the pivotal stages of their games’ development. Alisher shares his experience on deciding why Pollen VC was a suitable partner: “Pollen VC helped us to tighten up operations as we could obtain the owed revenues stuck in payment delays. We were quickly able to receive the money due and invest back into marketing - it helped us to fix the cash gaps in the company.”