Amazon “acquired GameSparks for $10M to build out its gaming muscle”

PanARMENIAN.Net - Amazon and its enterprise cloud division AWS have been making a number of moves to expand the company as a platform to build and host games. One of the latest developments has been an acquisition: Amazon in the last quarter reportedly quietly acquired a company called GameSparks, a “backend as a service” for game developers to build various features like leaderboards into games, and then manage them, all in the cloud. According to documents from deal analytics firm PitchBook, the acquisition price was $10 million, TechCrunch said.

Rumors of the acquisition first surfaced earlier this month with no detail about the price nor confirmation from Amazon, which refused to comment on rumor and speculation when we asked about it. GameSparks never responded to our questions.

Subsequent to that, though, TechCrunch tracked down more information. Two people close to the deal, both GameSparks investors, said they could not speak about the company due to non-disclosure agreements they had signed. When TechCrunch asked a contact inside Amazon about it earlier this week, that person also did not deny the deal and hinted it would be reflected in this quarter’s earnings.

Those quarterly earnings revealed that Amazon had made $633 million in acquisitions in the quarter.

Of that $633 million of acquisitions on Amazon’s quarterly report, $580 million is attributable to Souq.com, an Amazon-style marketplace based out of the Middle East.

Doing a bit more math, incidentally, might also give you a rough idea of what Amazon also paid for another acquisition it quietly made this past quarter, of search and analytics startup Graphiq. Taking $580 million from $633 million, you get $53 million. Taking away the $10 million paid for GameSparks (per PitchBook’s report) from $53 million, you get $43 million, which falls in the ballpark of the $50 million the LA Times reported when it broke the news of Graphiq’s acquisition.

GameSparks — co-founded by Griffin Parry (CEO), Gabriel Page (CTO) and John Griffin (COO) — lets game developers build “server-side capability” for their games by way of APIs and a cloud-based coding tool, and then manage those features after they are launched. Features that developers could build using GameSparks’ platform include leaderboards, real-time and turn-based multiplayer, notifications and player save data.

Offering cross-platform compatibility and supporting all major engines and stores including Unreal, Unity, PS4, XBOX, iOS, Google Play and Steam, GameSparks counts large studios like Rovio, Ubisoft, Square Enix and Bandai Namco, as well as more independent developers, as customers.

But in another regard it was largely under the radar. Co-headquartered in Dublin, Ireland and York in the north of England, well out of the Silicon Valley landscape, PitchBook notes that GameSparks raised only $820,000 from a small group of investors that included Enterprise Ireland (a government group that provides funding and support for Irish companies expanding internationally), and individual investors Jeff Allen, Joseph Murray and Paul Bushell.

It competes against the likes PlayFab — which (coincidentally to Amazon) is based in Seattle and has raised $13 million from Benchmark, Madrona and a number of individual investors.

Amazon’s interest in GameSparks fits in well with what the company has built so far in the gaming space, and specifically with games hosted in the cloud.