Playco raises $100 million
Meet one of gaming’s newest unicorns. Playco has raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation for instant games over a wide variety of platforms.
That’s a lofty valuation for a company making a web browser gaming engine for instant games that are playable on a web link and can run on any platform. The funding comes as the industry is discussing a “post-app store” world, and instant games may be an ideal vessel for delivering games with the potential to reach billions of players.
Sequoia Capital Global Equities and Mino Games founder Josh Buckley led the round, with participation from Sozo Ventures, Raymond Tonsing’s Caffeinated Capital, Keisuke Honda’s KSK Angel Fund, Taizo Son’s Mistletoe Singapore, Digital Garage, Will Smith’s Dreamers VC, and Makers Fund.
Playco is targeting platforms such as cloud streaming, Google Play Instant, iOS App Clips, Facebook Instant Games, and Snapchat Minis. Playco will make games, provide the backend infrastructure and analytics, and distribute the games across a number of instant game platforms.
“There are a lot of different technologies that can power what an instant game is, whether it’s cloud streaming like xCloud or Google Stadia,” said Playco CEO Michael Carter in an interview with GamesBeat. “It could be on the web using web assembly, or JavaScript. And there’s a new push with binary streaming, which is quite interesting with iOS App Clips, which comes with iOS 14, as well as Google Instant Play. They let you play a game before you’ve installed it.
“Every single major tech company — Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and Google — is investing in this type of technology in a big way. And there’s no company that is focused on answering the question of what is the killer game for this new shift. We decided that we’d go after this as a content company.”
