Roblox attracted many developers who create their own games on the platform. Some of them need help to scale and monetize their projects, and that’s when publisher Gamefam comes up.
Ultimate Driving
Gamefam CEO Joe Ferencz describes the company as the “first and only fully-dedicated, professional game publishing company on Roblox.” It offers a wide range of services, including marketing, monetization, support, and live operations teams.
Ferencz started Gamefam in 2019 “with the intention of bringing the professionalism that we’ve come to know in the gaming industry at large to Roblox.” Prior to that, he had a 20-year experience in the entertainment business, working on different positions at Ubisoft, Nintendo, Sony, and Mattel.
Although mobile gaming has been rising in terms of revenues, Ferencz thought that it has become an area where economics drives game design decisions. A few years ago, he realized that Roblox was going to be the next big platform and a place where creators could “escape the orthodoxies of free-to-play gaming.”
“Roblox truly is the metaverse for this younger generation. What that means is that each game needs to have a very distinctive and attractive immersion to it, in a way that mobile free-to-play doesn’t,” Ferencz told TechCrunch.
Gamefam was created to help these young developers scale their projects. Now the company has 37 employees who operate eight games, with around 50 million monthly visitors. These titles generate six figures in monthly revenues.
“I guess our unique calling card is that we are truly a hybrid of what we call native Robloxian developers. And so we are about half gaming industry veterans from places like Ubisoft, Zynga, Blizzard, and DeNA and half Robloxians,” Ferencz told GamesBeat.
Gamefam built a good reputation among Roblox creators, with more people wishing to partner with them. For example, the company recently helped Little World, developed by three cousins from Eastern Europe, double its weekly revenue.
Gamefam has also been partnering with Ultimate Driving creators for a while. And it resulted in the game doubling its 7-day retention rate and increasing its monthly revenue by 50% since June 2020.
Joe Ferencz says that the company could publish games on other platforms in the future. However, Roblox and UGC gaming still remain Gamefam’s main focus.