Mar 2nd 2021
Vungle Acquires GameRefinery, a Leading Mobile Game Analytics Company
Vungle exists to help mobile app developers build their businesses. Today is another step along our journey to deliver more products and services that help our partners.
We are excited to share that we have acquired GameRefinery, a cutting-edge mobile game analytics company. GameRefinery has built a leading platform to help mobile game developers create the most engaging and profitable games.
GameRefinery’s world-leading contextual data sets bring innovative targeting capabilities to Vungle’s platform, driving UA performance in today’s privacy-focused landscape. Their image recognition and machine learning tagging capabilities will be leveraged by Vungle Creative Labs to strengthen creative insights and deliver contextually relevant stories. GameRefinery’s SaaS platform, Game Intelligence, will help Vungle empower game development, research, and ad targeting with the market’s largest dataset on mobile game genres & features, player motivations, and more.
Together with GameRefinery and AlgoLift, Vungle offers the only platform that speaks to game and product teams in the content and creative development process, marketing, UA and growth teams in the scaling stage, and data teams when measuring and refining outcomes.
We are excited to have GameRefinery join the Vungle team and we look forward to the many new opportunities this partnership will bring. We will continue to share updates with you in the near future.
FAQ – Everything You Need to Know
Who is GameRefinery?
GameRefinery’s mission is to help game developers build and launch successful games armed with intelligence that goes deeper than what competitors offer. They are a leading cloud-based mobile game analytics platform with deep contextual data sets and image-recognition technology that helps developers market, design, and monetize their mobile games.
GameRefinery, based in Helsinki, was founded in 2014 and is led by an experienced, founding team of Markus Råmark (CEO), Veli-Pekka Julkunen (VP, Data & Product), and Joel Julkunen (VP of Games).
GameRefinery’s team of gaming experts focus extensively on data analytics. They were recently recognized in Deloitte’s “Fast 50” as Finland’s fastest growing tech company and maintain strong relationships with over 70 of the largest game developers in the industry, including Zynga, King, Rovio, FunPlus, DeNA, and Scopely among others.
What does GameRefinery bring to Vungle’s mobile performance advertising platform?
GameRefinery has built a leading platform to help mobile game developers build the most engaging and profitable games. GameRefinery’s world-leading contextual data sets bring innovative targeting capabilities to Vungle’s platform, driving UA performance in a privacy-focused landscape. GameRefinery’s image recognition and machine learning tagging will be leveraged by Vungle Creative Labs, strengthening creative insights to deliver contextually relevant stories. GameRefinery’s SaaS platform, Game Intelligence, will help Vungle empower game development, research, and ad targeting with the market’s largest dataset on mobile game genres & features, player motivations, and more.
Together, with GameRefinery and AlgoLift, Vungle offers the only platform that speaks to game and product teams in the content and creative development process, marketing, UA and growth teams in the scaling stage, and data teams when measuring and refining outcomes.
What benefits will the GameRefinery acquisition bring to advertisers?
With upcoming changes on iOS 14 and the removal of the IDFA, advertisers are looking for new and relevant ways to find and engage users. GameRefinery is yet another step forward in Vungle’s investment in contextual data and creative technology.
GameRefinery’s deep contextual data will offer new ways for advertisers to find relevant audiences, using non-personal data such as player motivations, moods and styles and audience personas, for campaign targeting with no device level ID required.
GameRefinery’s automated creative tagging combines visual cues with publisher data, enabling advertisers to create more impactful and contextually relevant creatives that perform. GameRefinery can tag genres, visual elements, moods, styles, and player motivations for video creatives at scale.
What benefits will the GameRefinery acquisition bring to game developers?
GameRefinery’s Game Intelligence suite provides actionable insights for game developers to help them design better games. The cloud-based platform informs developer retention and monetization mechanics through their data and developer tools.
With over 600 data points across 160K+ games, GameRefinery’s insights go deeper than just app store rankings, showing developers features that drive revenue. Developers can drill down on competitors and market trends, from live events and popular social features, to rewarded game play or premium currencies.
The platform also includes game comparisons, visual elements, and player motivations alongside feature analysis to further help developers see more specifically what drives retention and revenue. Developers can use this research to better define feature roadmaps and ultimately better game experiences for optimal revenue.
How does GameRefinery acquisition support Vungle’s product vision?
Vungle works to build products that our partners need to grow their businesses – ensuring they can overcome industry-wide pain points and challenges. With the GameRefinery acquisition, Vungle will be able to offer new contextual targeting products and tools to our partners that bring even more growth opportunities in a world without mobile device identifiers.
Additionally, Vungle Creative Labs will have new data sets to provide deeper creative design recommendations for our customers that drive an incremental performance story at scale. We will be able to bring more insights into which creatives work best and in which apps, with access to a richer set of features for game and creative analytics.
Finally, we will be able to add new value to game developers by identifying ways to build better games and how they can successfully monetize. With GameRefinery’s platform, we can now offer in-depth game insights across feature sets, player motivations, genre fit and more that developers can use to measure the impact of their game design choices, evaluate against competition, and ultimately drive a more profitable game roadmap.
What success has GameRefinery had with their customers?
GameRefinery has been able to demonstrate great success with many of their top game developers.
FuturePlay was able to quadruple their spend profitability and increase their speed of scaling UA campaigns by using GameRefinery’s contextual data to solve the ‘cold start’ problem of being able to identify the best performing apps they should advertise in.
Ubisoft wanted to determine which updates and live features they should incorporate in their games for the best user experience. Using Game Intelligence, they were able to identify the features with the highest impact at a reasonable implementation cost.
Here is a testimonial from FunPlus on their success with GameRefinery:
“GameRefinery is the unique game intelligence platform that helps FunPlus during the whole game development process, from the concept stage and market discovery… to launching a game and keeping track of the competition.”
– BC Zhang, Head of User Experience at FunPlus
For more examples, click here.
What does Huuuge Games, a customer of both Vungle and GameRefinery, have to say?
“GameRefinery and Vungle are both integral partners for Huuuge Games and have also helped grow our loyal user base over the past few years,” said Anton Gauffin, CEO of Huuuge Games.” Both companies are very aligned with what mobile game developers are looking for; the fact that they have now joined forces now means that we will have access to a fantastic arsenal of tools that will help us grow even further in a post-IDFA, contextual world.”
How will GameRefinery be integrated with Vungle?
We are excited to welcome the entire GameRefinery team to Vungle. The team is currently based and will remain in Helsinki, Finland. Vungle will be officially adding a 10th office to our current list: San Francisco, London, Beijing, Berlin, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, New York and now Helsinki.
For more information, you can read our official press release here. If you have any additional questions about Vungle’s acquisition of GameRefinery, please email us at info@vungle.com.
