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📡 1. StarLark's Golf Rival Acquired for $525M, 2. Splinterlands Blowing Up!, and 3. Metaverse Now!

📡 1. StarLark's Golf Rival Acquired for $525M, 2. Splinterlands Blowing Up!, and 3. Metaverse Now!

GameMakers Games Radar Thursday

August 06, 2021

Happy Games Radar Thursday,

Here is an I. game alert, II. word on the street, and III. question to consider this week…

If you haven’t already subscribed consider joining now:

I. Game Alert

If you don’t already know about Golf Rival you will know, now that Zynga is acquiring the game.

The Rundown (from Reuters and Venturebeat):

Zynga agreed to buy China’s StarLark, the creator of “Golf Rival” for $525M in stock and cash
$315 million of cash and approximately $210 million of Zynga common stock
Golf Rival is the second-largest mobile golf game behind Playdemic’s Golf Clash
Zynga CEO Gibeau on Golf Rival: “Golf Rival is a casual player-versus-player (PvP) experience. It’s kind of Words with Friends with golf clubs… I think it’s the fastest-growing golf game right now.”
Gibeau on Golf Rival vs. Golf Clash: “They’re both golf games, but this is in line more with the social mission we have at Zynga… It’s a social game, more focused on fun player-versus-player (PvP) and fantasy courses. We believe it is a lot more accessible and a little bit less hardcore.”

Let’s look at the game’s performance.

Downloads:

Revenue: Notice below how revenue trails downloads by a month or two. Despite the decline over the past month, we should see revenue increase over the next month or two

RPD (Revenue per download) Growth:

Quick Comps

Embracer recently acquired 8 companies (CrazyLabs, Danish Firms Easy Trigger, 3D Realms, Slipgate, Ghost Ship Games, Sweden’s Grimfrost, France’s DigixArt, Netherlands’s Force Field) for $300M
This equates to 1X Revenue and 6X EBIT upfront, 2X Revenue including earn-outs
Playdemic acquisition for $1.4B by EA
Zynga’s StarLark acquisition (for $525M) multiples for revenue (slightly under) and EBITDA (in mid to high teens) in line with Playdemic acquisition

II. Word on the Street

Venture capitalist Alexis Ohanian tweeting about gaming in 2021:

2021 is going to be a defining year in gaming.
— Alexis Ohanian 🧠 (@alexisohanian)
2:45 AM • Jul 27, 2021

… after having changed his profile pic to an Axie:

“Splinterlands is blowing up… land packs were like $10, now $150. Card packs were $2, now $25"
The below were originally priced at $1K:

“YGG also owns a significant portion of the Splinterlands land apparently as well.”
Read more on Splinterlands: here

III. Question For You

WTF is all this Metaverse crap about?

Mark Zuckerberg is betting Facebook’s future on the Metaverse, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggested Microsoft will build a new layer of infrastructure the “enterprise metaverse", and we all know Tim Sweeney from Epic and Dave Baszucki from Roblox are orienting their respective companies around the Metaverse.

In fact, it’s rumored that all new initiatives at Epic must be related to the Metaverse.

Having said that, what is it? There are so many definitions and ideas of the Metaverse it’s really not clear what people mean when they describe the Metaverse.

Alright, so I have 2 Metaverse questions for you below!

#1. WTF is it?

What will the Metaverse actually wind up being in the future?

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash | vote
Primarily VR experience | vote
Zuck “embodied Internet” where instead of viewing content you are in it and accessible by all compute platforms | vote
Shared experience platform | vote
Virtual GUI to real-world transactions | vote
A bunch of b.s. intellectual posturing | vote
Something else | vote