Disruptor Beam has changed its name to Beamable and pivoted to making a technology platform that enables mobile game developers to scale, monetize, and sustain their games. The move was expected after Tilting Point acquired Disruptor Beam’s Star Trek: Timelines mobile and PC game as well as the team that made it.
Beamable CEO Jon Radoff said in an interview with GamesBeat that one of the greatest challenges game makers face is balancing precious resources. It is all about the tension between creating what they and their players love and the need to make the business work. His company is pivoting to help game studios find that balance.
He said Beamable enables game developers to turn their products into scalable, sustainable businesses by incorporating what he claims is best-of-class commerce and social functionality.
“It’s a new life in the business, a complete restart using the technology we used to build Star Trek: Timelines,” Radoff said. “It’s basically all the things you need to operate a game as a service. We moved it out of the game and packaged it into a technology that can be sold to other developers. The rebirth of the company now is around this technology.”
Beamable has a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) that enables in-game storefronts, merchandising, content management, and rich social interactions for players—built to scale to as large a population of players as needed.
And it also has a front-end technology that bridges the gap between backend services, the Unity 3D editor environment, and the live game experience—to make it easier to create, maintain and deliver sustainable games. The features include commerce services, content management for things like live events without having to update a game client, and social tools that help developers spread the word about their games.
Disruptor Beam’s previous games, like Star Trek: Timelines and Game of Thrones: Ascent, always had real-time authoring pipelines that enabled the company to give fans content related to the TV shows, making a plot point from an episode appear almost immediately within a game. That’s important for developers who want to stay relevant for their fans. Tilting Point will use Beamable for Star Trek: Timelines.
“I’m passionate about the idea of solving problems for millions of game developers out there,” said Radoff. “Unity has been very successful at bringing development to all sorts of developers. What hasn’t happened yet is making business models accessible to all.”
“Game developers should focus on what they love to do, rather than to try to reinvent the wheel on things that have been created before,” Radoff said.
Although games continue to thrive amid the global crisis of 2020, game studios frequently struggle to meet the demands of their players while also investing in business systems that can support their growth.
“In the past, people built technologies like this from a middleware perspective,” Radoff said. “But we made it democratized for game developers, so you can drag and drop these features right into your game.”
Beamable is available via an early access program, and it is open to games that are live, or plan to launch in the next 12 months. Beamable has a dozen employees.
“The company I started was a game company. Our understanding of the game development process and game technology is what we bring to other developers,” Radoff said. “If we can help thousands of other studios and millions of other people, that’s great.”
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