A new Charlottetown firm that helps game and app developers increase income has tripled its staff in six months and plans to double it again by Canada Day.
As it is now structured, RevIQ is more a service company than a conventional product-based startup, and its nine-member team helps game and app developers use their data to develop more successful sales strategies.
The problem the company addresses is that the world is awash with free-to-play games, and it’s difficult to make money from them. There are only two revenue streams: selling the player bonus items, and advertising. But less than six per cent of players will pay money for these bonuses, even on the most popular games, and it’s hard to attract advertisers if players abandon the game after a few plays.
“You have to continue to engage the player and it’s really hard to compete for players,” said CEO John Kimmel in a phone interview last week from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. “And some (companies) are reluctant to ask how to get money out of their customers. “
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RevIQ began as part of Gogii Games, a Moncton-based producer of casual and free-to-play games, whose portfolio includes the games based on the Archie comic series. The company is a Canadian leader in the development of these games, and it developed analytics tools and processes that could assess how to increase revenue from its games.
Gogii began to advise other gaming studios on how to increase their revenue, but this created a conflict as some of these companies competed with the Moncton group. So last October, Kimmel and Gogii CEO George Donovan announced that it would spin off RevIQ, to be established in Charlottetown.
There was immediate demand for the service. This consultancy work had been cash flow positive (meaning it brought in more cash than it expended) while it was within Gogii, and it has been cash flow positive ever since. That’s a true rarity in the startup world.
The company launched with three employees, and it’s now increased the staff to nine. Kimmel expects to raise the number to 19 by the end of June.
The growth has been financed entirely by revenues. RevIQ, continued those sales efforts last week at the Game Developers Conference, one of the largest gaming conferences. (RevIQ and Gogii were part of a 12-member Atlantic Canadian contingent that included such companies as Celsius Game Studios, of St. John’s, and 4th Monkey Media, of Lunenburg.)
Kimmel said he was talking to a few companies at the conference about signing deals.
As it looks ahead, RevIQ plans to train its new staff, increase its client base and get the team working with new and existing clients. Kimmel said he hopes to “increase the density of the clients we’ve got.”
And it wants to further develop its analytics tools, and possibly to release them as a stand-alone product. The idea is to sell or license the product to clients, so RevIQ in the end would become more of a conventional startup rather than a service company.
