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PlayStack explains its end-to-end publishing model

PlayStack explains its end-to-end publishing model

Publishing fund PlayStack began life in April 2016 before being announced at Gamescom in August. We caught up with CEO and founder Harvey Elliott to see how the firm's first year has gone 

It’s been just over twelve months since PlayStack. How would you assess your first year?

It's been really good. The strategy is the same; what we set out to do a year ago is the same thing we're doing now. We met way more developers than we expected to, quite surprisingly. My background is in development so I know what developers want to hear and what they need – good people to publish their game, money for marketing and support while building it. We had about 450 submissions of companies and games in a year. We thought we'd get about 150. I like being able to help people and give them what they need.

We have six projects that we're supporting and we'll end the year with six in the market and many more in the pipeline. Next year we have a really strong line-up which we are continuing to refine. 

On to the ‘less good’ bits – raising money is hard for any business. Raising money for someone else's business is even harder. It's just meant more meetings and more investment rounds. When you have so much opportunity you want to follow through that's really hard. Staying on top of what everyone needs from you and the money they need and the timing, that's probably stretched us more than I'd like. We'll get ourselves into a really strong position before the end of the year.

Your end-to-end approach to publishing is pretty interesting. Could you tell us a bit more about this?

We have three parts to the business. We're there to find great developers, give them the support they need, bring their game to market and make it successful. 

The main thing developers need is money, if I just used money we have earned or raised, you can only do so much. But if you can use that to raise more money to invest more money, then that's a better way of doing things. We've set up a fund, the PlayFund, it's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulated, operated by an independent partner that handles all the regulation and structure, we do all the sourcing and recommendation for that, and invest in companies. That's where PlayFund works.

We also have AppStart. That is for games that have already been released, but developers are waiting for the money from the stores. So we have raised a marketing fund specifically for that. We have millions to spend there if we can prove we'll earn it back.

The optimal company is someone we'd meet, invest in them as PlayFund, publish them as PlayStack and use AppStart money to scale the project. But equally, we're happy to invest in them as PlayFund and maybe not be their publisher, but support them with AppStart. If they decide to do all three things then that'd be great for us. 

How much of a focus is PC to you? So far you have largely focused on mobile and VR titles.

We have a few PC titles in the works. It's a phenomenal platform for certain games; they're more engaging but by that definition, they take a bit longer to make. So, the mobile games tend to be the faster ones to market. We have got, in the pipeline, we do have some several PC-only experiences and are built for PC and are right for PC. They just take a little bit longer to make.

The nature of feedback and time they need is just greater, so it takes longer to get to market. Some of the mobile games we have, we can sign them and have them through really quickly. The mix will end up being 40 or 50 per cent mobile, 30 per cent PC and the rest will be console or something else. Once you have a hit on one platform, you ask how you can make that work elsewhere, so we'll think beyond PC, we'll think about mobile or tablet. You open up more platforms. Certainly, I know that developers will benefit to go beyond cross-platform but not at the cost of their core experience. Let's figure out what the game is going to be and figure out how to bring that over.

What’s your ambition for PlayStack’s second year?

I'd like us to have a good portfolio in the market, have 12 to 15 games in market. I would like to have announced our PlayFund close, which will be in March or April. I'd like that to be sizeable enough to give us the pipeline for the third year. I think that's a good route for us to source a lot of our games. We're going to publish games we haven't invested in and we'll fund games that we haven't invested in. There's lots of different models.

My ideal would be raising our fund and people are applying to be part of it and help contextualise it more for developers. What I realise is that in all these conversations is I say any platform, any sized team, any anything, and that's quite hard for a developer to get their head around.

We'll have a better sweet spot of what we want as we get closer to the end of our fiscal year and into next. We'll also have our AppStart which will help us prove we can scale games, so that'll open up a lot of the industry. Developers will benefit from it, PlayStack will do alright, but the money is a real enabler. I'd like to see that flowing. We want all three parts to be humming and I'd like to not be the person running all three parts.


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PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.