Market Summary
Last updated
Last updated
Games are the most important form of art and media category in the 21st century.
There are 3.3 billion players of games—a number that will continue to grow, fueled by rapid expansion in emerging economies, as well as new business models and new media tie-ins. Games have even become a driver of traditional media, just as new hit shows, including Fallout—reaching an audience of over 65 million viewers in its first two weeks—have proved.
Likewise, the number of online games has dramatically expanded: nearly 19,000 games were launched on Steam, the leading PC game distribution platform, in 2023.
Mobile games are even more prolific, with over 700,000 on the Google Play and iOS App Store.
Live Services is Eating Gaming
In a poll of over 500 game studios, 95% of them are already operating—or intend to release—a Live Services game. Live Services games are those with online components. Online features can range from the simple (occasional content updates or cooperative features) to the complex (complicated social systems, real-time interaction, or virtual economies). Live features increase a game’s key metrics—retention, revenue, engagement—and are here to stay.
In the past, game studios built their own Live Services technology. This is how games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends were built. These companies were the pioneers, and few examples came before them. Yet building this infrastructure frequently costs tens of millions of dollars; one 2024 research report put the average cost at approximately $22M per studio.
Studios Prefer Buying to Building
It makes sense for studios to buy their Live Services technology instead of building it themselves: in a market where fun-funding and development velocity are paramount, the risks and costs of a home-brew solution are often too significant.
Studios see many reasons to buy: improving their development velocity (i.e., time-to-market), improving stability, standardization, cost reduction, and avoidance of technical debt:
Early gaming backend technology companies emerged in 2015, including PlayFab (now part of Microsoft) and GameSparks (subsequently discontinued by Amazon).
Subsequent products have offered alternatives, but they all contain centralized dependencies of various kinds—sometimes proprietary code and sometimes dependencies on specific infrastructure providers.
Beamable has taken a different approach compared to other backend technology vendors: one focused on extensibility and interoperability. Version 1.0 was released in 2022 after years of development first begun at Disruptor Beam, a game studio that shipped live games to 20 million players. Since that time, Beamable has opened its ecosystem to third-party developers to build extensions to its platforms. The next stage of Beamable is to remove centralized dependencies around compute suppliers.
