Backing Netspeak Games and building the Operational (Gaming) VC
Project A is super excited to be once again investing in gaming by backing Callum Cooper-Brighting and the amazing team at Netspeak Games for their $12m Series A. Project A co-led this round along with our friends at Lakestar Capital and Makers Fund together with some super gaming industry angels including Phil Mansel (Jagex), Hilmar Veigar Petursson (CCP) and Catherine Chew (Kepler Interactive). More information can be found here at VentureBeats (thank you Dean Takahashi for the coverage).
I have known Callum for many years before partnering together for this investment round and I was a play tester for the super early builds of their flagship title Sunshine Days. Even during the earlier play tests, it was obvious that this game had a subtle but mass appeal capturing an underserved hybrid casual to mid-core player segment — also not just female players but male players too. Moreover, Sunshine Days has huge potential for developing both high reliability quests like house decorations and new content like opening up new islands to explore. Callum has also built a high performance team with both game design and scalable infrastructure experience which we are excited to be working with!
Instead of writing 300 more words on the genuinely fun experience of Sunshine Days which will not do the game justice, I recommend you spend 10 to 20 minutes having a play of the early access version yourself which can be found here for Android and here for the iPhone. The game is designed perfectly for bite-sized consumption (on the bus, train, commute to work etc.) and brings a therapeutic break from the anxieties of our daily digital lives.
Since our investment, the Project A operational teams have been working hand in hand with the Netspeak Games team on supporting them with the game launch. So far our teams have worked together on title branding, live operations / data analytics, recruitment and most interestingly performance marketing.
Our performance marketing and data teams have been working with Netspeak Games across acquisition (UA) and live operations (LiveOps). Callum and the team have built outstanding performance creatives and game mechanics that we are lucky enough to be able to assist in distribution and scaling. We have been hands-on helping to build out Netspeak’s data infrastructure, supporting player cohort analysis and undertaking channel / CPI optimisation. While we are not game designers or developers (we leave that to the pros), we do have a very successful track record in UA and data analytics that we believe would rival those of top game publishers as we continue to invest in gaming studios.
If you are a gaming founder looking for investment and would like to partner with a more operational gaming investor, you can reach me at jack.wang@project-a.com or discord capulet#7874.
