TWEET THIS
Selcuk Atli likes to make things. One of the things he likes to make is music. A gifted singer, songwriter and guitarist, Atli has been making music since he was a teenager back in his native Turkey. He just independently released his latest album with his band called The HMMS. However, Atli is better known for another thing he likes to make: companies. A prolific serial entrepreneur, Atli has created five companies in nine years and has led three of them to successful acquisitions. His latest has the opportunity to be a game changer...literally. It’s called Bunch.
Bunch is a group video chat app that makes it easy for people to socialize while playing games on their smartphones. Here’s how it works: with a couple of taps, a user with the Bunch app on their phone can invite up to eight of their friends into a live hangout session. Then everyone in the session can opt in to play the same game at the same time and interact via voice and video while doing it. Bunch comes bundled with its own native mini-games but also integrates with a sizable catalog of third-party mobile games, including Fortnite, Roblox and HQTrivia. It brings a real-time social dimension to a class of digital games that were once only associated with isolated one-player or asynchronous turn-based experiences.
While there’s certainly no shortage of social media apps in app stores nowadays, it doesn’t hurt that the space that Atli is looking to add a social twist to is as big as it’s ever been. The global gaming industry generated $121.7 billion in 2017 according to market researcher Newzoo, a figure that eclipsed the global film industry’s take, which was $40.6 billion that same year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. And that figure is only set to grow with secular trends like massive multiplayer gaming and esports continuing to fuel the market.
However, Bunch isn’t the first startup to have realized the burgeoning need for social tools catered to live gamers. Twitch, which launched in 2011, seized this trend early on and grew to become the leading gaming-focused live streaming video platform in a few short years (Twitch was subsequently acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014). More recently, Discord, the ultra-popular communication platform for gamers, has skyrocketed to a user base of over 200 million while raising a war chest of over $280 million in venture funding and surpassing a valuation of $2 billion. So what makes Bunch different and gives it a fighting chance against such well-heeled incumbents? In short, two words: ‘mobile’ and ‘easy.’
In contrast to other pre-existing gaming-focused social tools, Bunch was built from the ground up to be mobile native. That’s a smart decision given that, for the first time ever, mobile made up more than half of all global game revenues in 2018 and is forecasted to make up 59% of the industry by 2021, according to Newzoo. This area of laser focus and the ease with which a user can start a “gaming party” on their phone with Bunch provide a distinct pivot from what previous, largely desktop-focused tools offer, says Atli. It also speaks directly to the needs of the newest generation of live gamer: a younger cohort that wants to play more casual games than hardcore-oriented desktop gamers and socialize on-the-go, at any time. “We see a different and younger audience spending more time playing less hardcore games with their friends on their phones,” says Atli. “That audience and that platform require a very different approach.”
No comments:
Post a Comment