720770Mediatonic Limited - CatapultClosedGRD Development of PrototypeInnovate UKGlobal games grew from $67b in 2012 to $91.5b in 2015. During this period the industry shifted toward web-enabled & mobile tech; spawning many new market entrants. With that, business models such as Free-to-Play with In-App Purchases (IAP) appeared and developers began to operate their games as ‘Live Services’ where the largest games in these categories for mobile and PC frequently exceed sales of $1bn/annum. Mobile devices, digital distribution and the rise of ‘indie’ developers created an excess of content (around 3m apps on Apple’s AppStore and Google Play alone). This deflated store prices and forced companies to find new ways to earn revenue. In a Live Services approach, companies use web-enabled tech to continually provide new content and to engage customers for longer – helping to grow lifetime revenue. Sources: Gartner, NewZoo, Statista, VentureBeat, Developer Economics Creating and supporting the new tech however, involves many set-up costs and technical know-how. The largest game studios are often leaders in 3D graphics, CPU performance and other client-facing tech but they are keen to pivot towards Live Services which presents significant challenges. Mediatonic designs, develops and manages games for the world’s largest publishers including Activision, Disney, Microsoft & Time Warner in the US and Europe; and DeNA, GREE & Square Enix in Japan. Our production experience across multiple live titles gives us a unique position to build an industry-leading technology platform to accelerate change in other companies. Our goal is to build an enterprise-level engineering solution that provides critical back-end Live Services for high-end games. Purpose built for large teams; Catapult will reduce costs and circumvent many fatal problems that developers find after launching their service. This project will develop a Prototype to demonstrate how this can be achieved and to validate the commercial potential.