A platform for next-gen mobile games raises $10M in Seed financing

Over the past year, there has been more and more criticism of mobile game stores. The loudest conflict is between the App Store and Epic Games, when the platform blocked the company’s most famous game, Fortnite, after the introduction of direct payments. Essentially, app stores have unlimited power. They decide which apps or games can appear on our phones and which cannot.

The Artie startup team decided to fight this monopoly. It developed a platform that rethinks mobile game distribution: you can play games inside the service without installing any additional apps on your phone. Games are launched directly from other apps and even messengers. This allows developers to bypass the “monopoly” of official stores, and thus save a significant percentage of revenue. According to the project’s founder, they thought about implementing their idea just before the conflict between the App Store and Epic Games. They saw how each year attracting users costs more and more for developers, and the mandatory 30% commission eats up the already falling revenue.

While other similar platforms are limited to the JavaScript and HTML5 they run on, Artie uses a different engine. It’s a cloud-based system, but it doesn’t run graphics through the cloud. This eases the load on the infrastructure and reduces possible errors in the process.

The startup is the result of a pivot of another project to create AR avatars and gathered a star team of people from Google, YouTube, Uber and other unicorns. The actual idea, high-quality execution and big names in management resulted in $10M of investments in Seed financing.

The money will be used to improve internal technology, increase the number of available games and the platforms on which it will be possible to run games (TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Twitch and YouTube.). The management also plans to work on key partnerships with celebrities, Influencers, and athletes to attract users and developers to the platform.