Do you use GIF animations in your online marketing? If no, perhaps you should try as GIF is predicted to be the most powerful digital marketing tool in 2017. That is not far from the truth. According to GIPHY today people watch more than 2 million hours of GIFs per day, and GIFs are seen by more than 100 million daily active users. GIFs are pretty big on Slack, Facebook and other social media. You can use them to send birthday greetings, share your emotions, and otherwise interact with friends. If you are an avid mobile gamer, now you capture and share GIFs from engaging moments in your mobile game. Because the world needs to know!
Norwegian-American Megacool provides mobile gamers with an opportunity to record a gameplay and share it via GIF. The app offers two ways to create a GIF from a game play: Time recording and single frames capture. Time recording is best suited for fast paced games, like action or racing games. Capturing single frames is great for turn based games and puzzles, like chess when you want to capture each state.
Founded in June 2015 by founding members of Dirtybit, the company developed and published some of the industry’s first synchronous multiplayer racing games with the Fun Run series of games. First launched in September 2012, Fun Run reached #1 in US Apple App Store without any marketing spend. In total, Fun Run games have been downloaded more than 100 million times all over the world and played by more than 15% of the US population.
“We are building an entirely new ecosystem of tools that mobile developers can use to grow a player base.”
“GIF is a great format for easy sharing of what a player has just experienced in a game, particularly on mobile devices where attention spans are short. But it’s just the start for Megacool and we look forward to sharing unique ways to boost downloads and grow a player base soon!” said Nicolaj Broby Petersen, co-founder and CEO of Megacool.
His company now has money to do it. Megacool announced today that they have raised a $1.5 million seed funding round lead by Alliance Venture. Norselab and Olympic medalist winner Aksel Lund Svindal also contributed to the seed round. The seed round will be used to expand the Megacool team, particularly the engineering and development team based in Oslo, Norway. Funds will also be used to accelerate product and business development as the company continues to expand their API and bring developers into the current beta.
Megacool’s API allows mobile game developers to try new methods for driving downloads and engaging users, utilizing one of the fastest growing media formats on the internet. Developers can set parameters within the API that determine when GIFs are recorded, based on high scores or other in-game activities and accomplishments so that players don’t have to toggle a record button.
“Traditional user acquisition is incredibly expensive as pricing has been driven up by the largest and richest publishers on the App Store, making it difficult for the majority of mobile devs to gain traction. Traditional ads are also obnoxious and intrusive, breaking gameplay and pulling the player out of the game,” comments Petersen. “We want to replicate word-of-mouth in mobile games by giving players a quick and easy way to record GIF moments within their games and seamlessly share them via text messaging and other social channels.”
Developers interested in joining the Megacool beta and using GIF sharing to drive downloads for their games can sign up here.
