GDevelop is a no-code game engine that lets you create, publish and monetise a video game without any development experience. Their mission is to democratise game creation.
Deck: Here
Fundraise: £500k
Founder: Florian Rival
My Notes
Team
Florian is GDevelop’s founder. Former Meta & Google engineer (Android Games devX team).
6 FTEs: 3x engineers, 1x product designer, 1x content creator (and Florian).
Motivation
Florian built the GDevelop prototype ten years ago as a passion project.
He’s always been naturally curious about how he could make fun games
Drive → insanely motivated to build something that lets people create amazing games and apps.
Problem
Gaming is huge but very few people can create a video game like they can a book, video, song etc.
Why? Fundamentally you need imagination but it’s also super complex and requires a lot of technical knowledge. Even for companies, games are inaccessible unless you're a game studio.
Solution
Easily understandable no-code creation and publishing tool for games. Available on browser and mobile (iOS & Android).
Super intuitive and easy. Create a game in 5 minutes here.
gd.games → publishing platform where creators are building hit games (high-quality games are being created. See here).
Tech is open-source which allows GDevelop’s community to improve the product continuously. 167 extensions built by the community; 4.8k stars on GitHub
Roadmap
Leverage GenAI so creators can generate assets and the logic for games from prompts.
Go Multiplayer → Increased social features to unlock network effects between games.
Vision
Moonshot → “The platform where all interactive and gamified media can be created.”
An end-to-end platform for gaming creation, publishing and monetisation.
Traction
200k monthly creators (people building games).
21k monthly active games (games users are playing).
All organic.
Market
B2C: 3bn gamers worldwide; $200bn annual revenue. 1% of gamers on Roblox and Minecraft are also creators on these platforms.
B2B: technology has applications beyond the gaming consumer market (promotional games for brands, workshops, presentations, pitch decks etc).
GTM
People discover GDevelop because they want to create games without knowing how to code.
Strong SEO —> #1 for “create a game” on Google.
Active communities on socials (especially Discord & Reddit). Strong WOM acquisition.
Monetisation
Freemium approach for creators. Create games for free but get more for paid tiers (i.e., levels, multiplayer etc).
Recently introduced enterprise subscriptions for startups and larger businesses - multiple seats, removing GDevelop branding etc. Currently have 2x clients who want to white-label the platform.
Fundraise
Raised £1m in May-21 led by Seedcamp with Ascension also participating.
Raising a £500k bridge to accelerate growth ahead of raising a larger round
Accelerate game creation with generative AI.
Social features (multiplayer → unlocks network effects between games).
Validate monetisation (marketplace + subscriptions + game monetisation).
GDevelop