Best Fiends — Now a $100 Million Brand!
2017 has been a busy and rewarding year at Seriously, during which we continued to build on strong foundations and execute in important areas.
And now, three years since we launched the original Best Fiends game, we just passed $100M in lifetime revenues, reached profitability, and had our biggest quarter to date.
Here’s a short summary of our approach and what we have focused on the past year to get there.
We treat our first property Best Fiends like an entertainment brand that will live for decades. We continually invest into our IP as we build out the world, introduce new characters and tell fun stories that enhance the experience.
With the audience shift to mobile devices from television and movie theaters, in-app purchase revenues on mobile are now bigger than Hollywood’s global movie box office. The mobile games market is now worth $46.1 billion annually (Newzoo) while the global theatrical box office in 2016 was at $39 billion (Variety).
As a creator on mobile, we have a direct connection with our audience, and get to use our content as a network to promote different Best Fiends products, events and updates.
This year, in games, we focused on two projects. Firstly, building out our original Best Fiends title. And secondly, developing a new title called Best Fiends Rivals.
On the original Best Fiends game, we transitioned to an update schedule where we release new content every week alongside special events that run daily. With data science now embedded in our product and marketing teams, we focused on measurable ‘return on ad spend’ for each marketing campaign. For our marketing spend in 2017 so far, we’ve seen a net return within 180 days, which is a great baseline to scale from.
Our new title Best Fiends Rivals is a super addictive player-vs-player puzzle game that is now in soft launch in Finland, Australia and the Philippines. The idea for the game came from members of the team who worked on the original title, and we backed them to spin it out and lead the project. Some of the early data is highly compelling, and reinforces our instincts that we’re on to something special with the title. More soon!
We’ve been really lucky to work with some exceptional creative talent on our games, and this year we launched our first animated shorts, with an equally strong talent roster attached.
The two animated shorts and associated content gave a big boost to our game downloads and to our in-game revenues, having been watched over 12M times, with 2M people sharing the animations from within our app. And we created in-game content and marketing propositions that connected the experience through our network.
We have four new animated shorts planned for 2018, which go into production in January. And with our latest game update, we launched our YouTube channel as an in-game video platform to strengthen the connection between the videos and the games. That’s worked out well and we’ve added nearly 100,000 new YouTube subscribers in the 10 days since going live.
In addition, we’ve been so inspired by the many positive comments on YouTube about our first two animations, that we’re now working on an even bigger animation project. More news on that next year!
At Seriously, one of our key values is ‘do the right thing’, which manifests in how we design our games and how we communicate in an upfront way with our team. We have also used our platform to work with charities like Malaria No More, WWF, Oceana and (RED). This year we partnered with Special Effect — an incredible charity that helps disabled gamers play the games that they love — on their 10th Anniversary.
We were proud to donate a day’s UK revenue to them, and, after we mentioned the idea to some of our colleagues in the industry, over 30 companies made the same commitment. Ultimately, we collectively raised over $500,000!
To wrap up, Q4 2017 will be our biggest quarter to date. We’ve been operating at EBITDA and cashflow positive all year. We’re on a $50M annualized run rate, and with some exciting plans, we have a great shot at scaling significantly from here.
Now that the business model is showing signs of promise, we’re in the early stages of building out our second IP, which we can’t wait to reveal in 2018.
Given the revenues and engagement being generated by subscription video platforms and mobile games, it’s ever more clear that IP owners need to be directly connected to their audience just to survive, as evidenced by Disney’s acquisition of Fox assets to drive their own direct to consumer service. Great read on that here. We’ve learned the direct audience connection is the most important aspect of our business, as the media landscape rapidly shifts.
In the meantime, a special thank you to our audience, as well to everyone we have worked with at Seriously this year. Thank you each and all, and Happy Holidays!
