Talent Marketplace for Video Gaming: Our Investment in Rupie

In video game development, studios spend ~$17B per year on outsourced talent. Rupie is a talent marketplace for game development and is led by a fantastic team in Austin Anderson, Jonathan Tzou, and David Panzarella.

We are thrilled to be the lead investor in their $1M Seed round alongside other fantastic investors, which includes KB Partners and Kevin Lin (co-founder of Twitch).

In 2018, Activision Blizzard alone paid out over $183M to outsourced talent. Over 15% of the developers who built Call of Duty, 300 of the ~2000, were outsourced contractors. According to Gamasutra, over 86% of game studios leverage outsourced talent at some point to build their game titles. Over 51% of non-AAA studio budgets go to labor costs and the AAA studios spend about 35% on labor costs. Over 49% of the world’s game developers are based in North America, a market which already accounts for over half of the gig / freelance economy.

In the outsourced talent space, generic talent marketplaces were the first movers and this spawned successful companies like Upwork, Fiverr, and Toptal.

In recent years, more specialized talent marketplaces by industry have emerged. Examples of this include companies like RigUp (oil and gas), Paro (finance), Mandy (performing arts), and many others. Yet in video gaming, there is no clear market leader addressing this issue.

We believe Rupie will be the marketplace leader who will directly address this $17B market opportunity going forward.

Given the rise of both remote work and video gaming, we fully expect this addressable market segment within game development to increase in the coming years. We believe this will be very positive for Rupie. The Rupie management team has a strong market presence, a proven ability to execute, and are a pleasure to work with.

We are thrilled to be in their corner.

If you’re a game studio, I’d highly encourage you to leverage Rupie for your game development talent needs. Click here to learn more.