What Is Progressive Publishing?
28 Jul 2022
If you’ve followed Tilting Point at any point since 2016, when we launched our very first UA fund for indie game developers, you’ve come across the term ‘Progressive Publishing’, and have very likely seen or heard us talk about how we are the pioneers of that model. Even so, you still may not entirely understand what it means, how it sets Tilting Point apart, or how it can apply to helping your company raise your game.
First and foremost, Tilting Point is a partnership-first company. Our overarching mission, as lofty as it may sound, is to change developers’ lives. We do that by accelerating and amplifying developers’ businesses, their live games and their technology. As a game maker, you might find yourself having conceived, designed and launched a cool Free to Play mobile game with a unique engine. Now you need for it to reach the largest possible audience, across geographies, demographics, and platforms. You may even want to bridge it from Web2 to Web3. What you may not yet have is the knowledge or capital to grow your game in the current market.
Growing a successful game is costly, and today’s market environment is changing all the time. The first step in building an audience is securing funding for modern, data-driven growth marketing campaigns, and that’s where the Progressive Publishing journey begins–with a live publishing partnership with a developer like yourself. We leverage our technology, our $132M annual User Acquisition (UA) fund, and extensive industry expertise to amplify your existing game through UA funding and management, app store optimization (ASO), ad monetization, platform deployment, possible expansion into the Play to Earn space and more.
It was with live publishing partnerships like these that Tilting Point began accelerating in 2018, but soon after, it became apparent that we could identify developers from our live publishing partnerships where there is a mutual desire to further our relationship, and provide a clear value proposition for them while ensuring we always have 100% alignment on new projects. This progression of the developer-publisher relationship is the heart of, and why we call it, Progressive Publishing.
The next stop on the journey after a successful first game partnership is to reach an even higher level of collaboration in which, together, we establish a vision for a new game using the first game’s engine. This is the co-development stage of Progressive Publishing. The new game could be given a different theme, or a globally-recognized and much-loved IP that Tilting Point has access to. For example, we partnered with Nickelodeon to bring SpongeBob Squarepants to a newly created version of the successfully scaled title Food Truck Chef, by Nukebox Games. We then let the developer take ownership of the design and production of the game while supporting it with all of our publishing services, and the result was the massive hit, Spongebob: Krusty Cook-Off.
A strong business relationship starts with acknowledging both parties’ strengths, and at Tilting Point, we acknowledge that developers know how to make the game, and we know how to grow the audience. That’s why our developer partners always maintain creative control of their product, and we focus on the strong organic marketing practices that help set the top performers apart from the rest. In addition to our ability to pair developers with powerful IPs, our deep relationships with gaming platforms help us maximize featuring opportunities and store visibility.
As we’ve previously referenced, our Progressive Publishing partnerships are centered not only around a game, but around the game’s engine. While we start by growing a live game, it’s even more accurate to say we evaluate a live engine that is proven, which we can then take much further with a co-development project, bringing in world-class IPs, and moving it onto platforms ranging from PC to consoles, or subscription services like Netflix or Apple Arcade. The real success is not only for the game we started with, but for the game engine and how we’ve multiplied its use.
The third possible stop on the Progressive Publishing journey is acquisition, where Tilting Point may offer to acquire a game or a development studio. In the case of a game acquisition, this allows the developer to focus their resources, energy and influx of funds on developing new games. And in the exciting event of a studio acquisition, our mission remains to amplify the developer and what they create. The studio continues to operate independently just as before the acquisition, but they are provided with significant additional capital, access to the world’s top IPs and to a publishing team of experts who come from and understand F2P games at their deepest level.
As of this year, Web3 marketing strategy is also one of our core strategic pillars. We can bridge games from Web2 to Web3, helping both our existing and new F2P partners expand into Play to Earn, and, with our extensive publishing expertise, we can help native Web3 game companies reach broader audiences.
One of our favorite examples of the success of the Progressive Publishing model is that of Edgeworks Entertainment’s award-winning terraforming sim, TerraGenesis. Edgeworks was a one-man operation by Alexander Winn, who created and coded the game as a work of passion while road tripping across New Zealand with his wife and co-founder Lacey. TerraGenesis became part of the Tilting Point portfolio with a Live Publishing partnership in November 2017. Tilting Point’s involvement in marketing and distributing the title on mobile platforms not only helped Edgeworks grow its staff from one to six employees, but it also increased TerraGenesis’ average gross revenue from $20,000 to $350,000 per month. We then helped the game expand from mobile to PC platforms in early 2020, and under Tilting Point’s guidance, TerraGenesis has surpassed 28 million downloads on all platforms. Tilting Point acquired the game from Edgeworks in the fall of 2020, and thanks to a continuing partnership, our companies are now set to launch the game’s eagerly-anticipated sequel, TerraGenesis: Operation Landfall later this summer.
The future of Free to Play games is ever changing, but with the tools and growing fellowship of our Progressive Publishing model, Tilting Point is here to navigate it with you. We have been at the forefront of tracking data loss mitigation the IDFA/GAID changes, we are experts in alternative payment methods, and Web3 is now one of our main amplifiers, alongside all our existing amplifiers for which we have the strongest reputation: UA funding and management, organic growth and ad monetization, co-development with big IPs, and M&A resources for the peak of successful partnerships.
We enable developers, creators, innovators to succeed. We want to raise your game, and we have all the tools, talent and expertise to do it. Please reach out to us if you would like to become part of the Tilting Point family!
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Tilting Point is a leading free-to-play publisher that powers up existing live games using deep marketing and product expertise, cutting-edge technology, Web2 to Web3 services, and a user acquisition war chest. Recognized as one of the top mobile game makers in the world by PocketGamer.biz in 2021, Tilting Point was founded in 2012, and has grown to a staff of over 460 people with offices in New York, Barcelona, Boston, Kyiv, Los Angeles, Seoul & San Diego. Tilting Point’s most successful games include SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, Star Trek Timelines, and Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest.
