GDevelop

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).