The Future of Gaming — It’s Mobile

To most, mobile games are simply a way to pass the time, relax, and take it easy. But to Josh Yguado, COO of Social Gaming Network, the mobile game market is serious business. According to Fortune magazine, the mobile gaming market in 2014 was worth 25 billion dollars, and Social Gaming Network, or SGN, is poised to take the lion’s share of the western market.

SGN was founded by Chris Dewolfe, Josh Yguado, and Aber Whitcomb. Two of the founders, Dewolfe and Whitcome, were the CEO and CTO of Myspace prior to SGN’s formation. Coming off the heels from leaving Myspace in 2009, the founders were looking to enter the mobile gaming market. Yguado mentioned that the they only had to look towards Asia and the triple-digit growth rates in its mobile gaming market to see that mobile gaming would one day become huge. On top of that, Dewolfe and Whitcomb found that much of the traffic going through Myspace were to games that Myspace was hosting. Yguado, who was formerly working for Fox in charge of business acquisition, left, and became the COO of what would become SGN.

Hailing from Albuquerque, NM, Yguado received a BA from Harvard and then an MBA from his alma mater’s business school. After working on Wall Street for a few years, Yguado moved west to work with Fox’s business development and strategy department. It was in LA where he met Dewolfe and Whitcomb.

SGN is not a typical startup by any means. Rather, it is a roll-up, which means that the company relies on steadily acquiring other companies to build its value, or in this case, SGN acquires mobile game studios. As of right now, the mobile gaming market is incredibly fragmented, with thousands of game studios, genres, and audiences. The goal that SGN hopes to accomplish then, to become a mobile-games giant as the crowded industry consolidates. However, SGN does not simply buy out companies and take a share of the profits, rather, SGN has built its own back-end software that allows seamless integration with outlets such as Google Play, Facebook, the App Store, and Amazon. This allows for a one-size-fits-all model that Yguado emphasizes — you can build an app once, and have it seamlessly integrated with every mobile/web gaming outlet at the same time.

While speaking with Yguado, one of the things that was brought up was that SGN does not make games for hardcore gamers. Rather, the company focusses on creating free, accessible, puzzle games. This is because SGN has found that such games are the ones that receive the most downloads, either through people advertising the game through sharing their accomplishments on social media, or that they are simply easy to play and have a low barrier to entry. All payments come through microtransactions, from the player buying lives to play more, or in-game currency. Though one thing that SGN has noticed is that their games tend to skew female, with females consisting of 70% of their total player base.

As the fastest growing mobile gaming studio in the states, SGN hopes to ramp up operations so that a public offering may be possible in the next five years. But by the time that happens, SGN may have already solidified themselves as one of the largest players in the worldwide mobile gaming market.

By: Aidan Cheng