Voodoo (company)

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For the luxury personal computer brand, see VoodooPC.

Voodoo SAS
ProductsHole.io
Owner
Number of employees
335[1] (2021)
Websitevoodoo.io

Voodoo SAS (also referred to as Voodoo.io) is a French

hyper-casual games", have been collectively downloaded 5 billion times as of May 2021. By February 2022, their apps surpassed 6 billion installs.[2] The company has been criticised for cloning
other games.

History

Voodoo was founded in 2013 by Alexandre Yazdi and Laurent Ritter.

vice-president of games.[5] According to Rivaud, the company was in turmoil for its first four years in operation and opted to change its business strategy thereafter.[5] Using data it gathered from its previous games, the company designed its newer games to attract more players.[5] Using the Unity game engine, Voodoo tested one new game roughly every week. This method resulted in the successful release of Paper.io in 2016.[6]

Through 2017, Voodoo quadrupled its staff count to 80 and expected to grow to 150 people by the end of 2018.[3] In May 2018, the American banking company Goldman Sachs, through its West Street Capital Partners VII fund, invested US$200 million in Voodoo.[3] It was the largest fundraising in the French technology sector since 2015.[3] Yazdi and Ritter retained control of the company.[3] At the time, Voodoo had, aside from its Paris headquarters, offices in Montpellier and Strasbourg.[3] A development studio in Berlin, Germany, was established in December 2018, headed by general manager Alexander Willink.[7] The studio started out with roughly ten people, looking to eventually expand to 40 employees.[7] It later hired key employees from developers Blizzard Entertainment, King, and Mamau.[8]

By September 2019, Voodoo employed 220 people, including 150 at its Paris headquarters.[6] A publishing office in Istanbul, Turkey, was announced in August 2019 and is headed by publishing director Corentin Selz.[9] This continued with the opening of a Montreal development studio in November 2019, led by Mehdi El Moussali, a former producer for Gameloft.[10] Through this new location, Voodoo intended to expand beyond hyper-casual games.[10] The company acquired Shoreditch-based developer Gumbug in December that year.[11]

By July 2020, Tencent was looking to acquire a minority stake in Voodoo, which was still majority-owned by Yazdi and Ritter.[12] Tencent acquired a minority stake to undisclosed terms in August that year. At this time, Voodoo was valued at $1.4 billion.[13] According to Yazdi, this deal would help Voodoo to extend their games into the Asia-Pacific market.[14] Voodoo subsequently opened offices in Singapore and Japan later that month, headed by Julian Corbett and Ben Fox, respectively.[15] In total in 2020, Voodoo saw revenues of €380 million, up from €1 million in 2016.[6] The company announced an investment in Istanbul-based developer Fabrika Games in September 2020,[16] and acquired Parisian developer OHM Games in December. OHM Games had developed four games for Voodoo in 2020, which together generated 260 million downloads.[17] Voodoo further bought BidShake, a Tel Aviv company developing a marketing automation platform, in June 2021.[18] Groupe Bruxelles Lambert acquired a 16% stake in Voodoo for €266 million in August 2021, valuing Voodoo at €1.7 billion.[19] Voodoo acquired the Israeli studio Beach Bum in September for a reported price of $250–300 million.[20][21]

Games

The majority of Voodoo's games are

monthly active users (MAUs), and 1 billion individual players.[11] Helix Jump, developed by H8games, is Voodoo's most successful game with more than 500 million downloads as of August 2020.[23][27]

External developers can submit games through an online platform for Voodoo to evaluate. The publisher has worked with over 2,000 such studios, which account for 75% of Voodoo's releases. The company finances select studios and supports them during the prototyping phase, receiving a royalty share in return.[6] Outside of games, Voodoo developed the social media platform Wizz in 2020. As of August 2021, the platform has 1 million MAUs in the United States.[6]

Reception

Voodoo has been criticised for releasing apparent

Rolling Sky), The Cube (Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?), and Hole.io (Donut County).[28][29][30] In the case of Hole.io, the game used the core gameplay mechanic of Donut County that has the player controls a hole in the ground to consume objects within the environment, progressively growing wider to be able to consume larger objects.[28][31] Ben Esposito had been working on Donut County for more than five years when Hole.io released in mid-2018, before Donut County's publication.[30][32] In response to an inquiry from Variety, Voodoo stated that Hole.io was not a clone of Donut County, although both were in the same sub-genre of games. Variety's Michael Futter noted that these games were the only two in this genre.[30]

Accolades

References

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External links

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