Voodoo

Leading mobile games and apps publisher

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Voodoo is recognized as a top 10 game maker by @pgbiz
Huge thanks to our incredible team and everyone who supports us.

Entertain the world with us: https://t.co/fUmhU0doBS

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Pourquoi Voodoo a-t-il acquis @BeReal_App ?
@YazdiAlexandre explique notre vision de faire de BeReal un réseau social majeur et iconique, centré sur l'authenticité. [In French Only]
https://t.co/0v1vxvEpCO

[Alexandre Yazdi @YazdiAlexandre]

I’m thrilled to announce that @BeReal_App is now part of @VoodooPlatform.

@BeReal_App is the most successful social app launched in nearly a decade.
They have created a unique behavior: sharing authentic content with true friends, and a visionary app, where every user is an active participant and not a passive consumer of content.

On @BeReal_App , there is no fear of being judged, and no need for time-consuming efforts of crafting a perfect façade.
Their success shows users crave this type of format, as a large portion of their 40 million active users use BeReal more than 6 days a week.

We believe we can push this mission to bring authentic connections to more users everywhere in the world.
@VoodooPlatform's main strength is to help great products and ideas reach the best possible life and scale they deserve, with all the growth technologies and skills we’ve developed over the past 10 years. We’re excited to bring these skills to @BeReal_App, and to welcome their talented team.

Special thanks to the @BeReal_App team for trusting us, and thanks to all @VoodooPlatform employees who made this possible.

Now our common goal is to build the next iconic social network, with authenticity at its core 🔥

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

⛔ Hyper-casual —> ✅ Casual

https://t.co/FiJ2HPZA1O

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Voodoo Music is excited to announce the release of the newest single “6 De La Manana” by French artist Jimmy Whoo in collaboration with Peruvian-American singer A.CHAL. The track is a perfect blend between the artists’ different cultures and an interesting mix of genres, including electronic, hip-hop and disco. We really enjoyed it and hope you will too!

Stream it now on your favorite platform
▪ Spotify: https://t.co/g9nwTnsN1Q
▪ Apple Music: https://t.co/OySOPTuX0x

[Alexandre Yazdi @YazdiAlexandre]

Voodoo just turned 10 this year.

It's been an adventurous journey full of hard work, fun, mistakes, ups & downs, breakthroughs, failures, fears of going bankrupt, and barely manageable growth.

Those moments truly shaped our culture, our strategy and the way we operate as a team.

For this milestone, I am very excited to share how we transitioned from a startup mass-producing minimalistic hyper-casual games, into a more structured organization that now delivers innovative mobile products with high production value, on a global scale:

2013-2016: Doing stupid stuff
My co-founder Laurent and I started the company in 2013, mainly driven by the will to create consumer mobile products that would inspire millions of people. Even if we had absolutely no experience in either apps or gaming, we decided to take the leap anyway and launch a mobile game.
At first, we took the most stupid approach by creating a quiz (which is not a big segment in gaming) in French for the French market (which is a tiny market).
We spent endless hours debating about the shape and colors of the buttons, the style of the logo, and after 10 very long months we finally launched the game, and it was a flop. Instead of simply trashing this product and starting again from scratch, we spent another year or so iterating, and trying to build something on shaky foundations.

2016-2017: Doing less stupid stuff
We started to understand that there was no proxy between the time spent on a game and its success, and that human beings (or at least us) were not the best at predicting the success of a new idea. So we launched quite a radical experiment: we asked each of our teams to create one game per week, and release it on the app store. We would then spend a little marketing budget to get real users, and test the quality of any game concept with real data. Even if, at first, this fast prototyping strategy was not very well received by our teams, they agreed to give it a try, and it had the most beneficial effect of all time: we could kill any low-potential concept after just 5 days of coding, the teams would find shortcuts to go fast while maintaining a sleek user experience, and we would explore large numbers of ideas rapidly.
Fortunately, after a few weeks, we launched a massive hit game: Paper .io. It would reach #1 in app stores in nearly every country, and more than 35m downloads its first year. It was also thanks to the marketing expertise we had developed over the previous 4 years on weak products.
This success attracted a large number of independent studios that saw how we were working and wanted in. We decided to seize the opportunity and helped all of them, for free, and split the profit their games would generate.

2017-2018: Hyper Growth
We went from working with 20 studios to 800, and from $1m to $400m in revenues in just 2 years, with a solid $120m profit.
It was a thrilling period, but also a very stressful one. We could barely keep up with the new studios inbound, the massive growth of our games, the launch of an increasingly high number of new games, and also the onboarding of many new employees. At the same time, we had to learn to structure our organization and keep our culture, and made plenty of mistakes on those fronts.

2019-2020: Calm before the storm
Our explosive growth and massive success attracted competition. Dozens of new hyper-casual studios popped up, trying to mimic our model. Thankfully, it was complex to replicate in full, as there were numerous aspects to be mastered: studio onboarding and scaling, product coaching, growth technologies & operations, monetization, and product optimization. Even so, our market share decreased, and our growth slowed down, but we were still very profitable.
Foreseeing that the future would not be as bright in the coming years, we decided to massively invest in new ventures: higher production value games (casual & midcore), non-gaming apps, and growth technologies.

2021-2022: Hangover
Then everything fell apart.
New regulations around ads and tracking policies accelerated the decline of our hyper-casual core business: its revenues were divided by 2 in just one year, as user acquisition costs went through the roof. The vast majority of our competitors didn’t survive this massive change, and we had to implement hard, radical, but life-saving measures.

2022-2023: Reborn
Hyper-growth and large funding capabilities had created bad habits, overconfidence, complacency and a myriad of inefficiencies. Hard times helped us to get rid of them. We first had to protect the company from cash burn, as there were no scenarios in which we could raise equity or debt, given the situation we were in. We managed to go from massive cash flow loss, to comfortable cash flow generation, ensuring our long-term runway, just by cutting projects with no potential, cutting unproductive costs, and parting ways with people who did not bring true value to the company in their current positions. We chose to keep only the few strategic projects that we truly believed in for our long-term growth. We called it the “financial fast”: getting rid of the fat, but keeping the muscle, ending up lighter, but stronger.

Then some of our new venture games and apps started to ramp up, after 3 years of strategic iterations: Mob Control, Collect Em All, Block Jam, Wizz, Blitz, WeMoms are the new generation of casual/midcore games and apps that are shaping Voodoo’s future.
To achieve this, we went through a complete redesign of our organization: we kept our fast-paced core gameplay teams, but directed them towards games with more depth, and had to hire hyper-skilled teams who took those prototypes to the next level by optimizing all aspects of the games (user experience, monetization, art, economy, balancing).

We also acquired a remarkable game studio, Beach Bum, leader in mobile board games, with astonishing product execution and optimization skills, accelerating our diversification even more.

Voodoo is now a new company, stronger than ever, that has nothing to envy its young hyper-growing version. We have a variety of games and apps, with diversified business models and audiences, and highly resilient revenues, that are forecasted to reach $600m this year, hyper-casual accounting for only 25% of that.

We have the best growth teams & technologies in the world, the largest number of prototypes tested every day, and product teams that are fast, innovative, and passionate about our mission to entertain the world.

2024 and beyond: Raising the bar
Those foundations give us the confidence to push our dreams further. We want to raise the bar and build the next generation of major iconic mobile games and apps that will inspire everyone around the world.

To make that happen, we aspire to be the destination company for the people with the highest ambitions, who are seeking a platform that will let them act with strong ownership and minimal processes, while providing them with the growth and tech infrastructure to give their products the best possible life and scale.

If those words resonate with you and you want to write Voodoo next chapters with us, you can apply online or DM me directly here on X.

Entertainment is among the most advanced forms of life, and games among the most advanced forms of entertainment. Working at Voodoo to achieve this mission, surrounded by so many exciting people, is incredibly thrilling.

Thanks to all our employees, investors, partners, friends and users all around the world who have shared a part of this 10-year journey.

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

“Gaming provides an unmatched level of data granularity, creating infinite opportunities for data-driven optimization, which is where I can really provide my expertise here at Voodoo.”

Meet our Data Analyst, Amélie Bellucci, in the article below ⬇️

https://t.co/ke1srtgcNE

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Looking to partner with our @voodooplatform Publishing team? 🚀

Dive into the article below to learn about what you can expect when you sign up to collaborate with us.

#Voodooblog #PressStart #publishing

https://t.co/YebfSGyWMk

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Apply now: https://t.co/kxAAUwMtvx

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Join a newly-created Voodoo team, which will be working on developing new B2C apps targeting a large audience on segments such as social media or entertainment. ☄️

#joinVoodoo #wearehiring

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Building this new team from scratch, we're looking for a Founding Product Designer to create simple, innovative, and intuitive experiences and flows for new Consumer apps 🚀

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Explore this month's case study to learn how Beach Bum studio maintains player engagement — Have a look at this article which features one of our most popular games: Lord of the Board Backgammon (LOTB).

#mobilegames #Voodooblog

https://t.co/PZpC2OFxjq

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Are you a studio willing to participate in our next Game Competition? 🏆

Sign up now:

◾ Studios new to Voodoo — Register here https://t.co/eKskOtlzsK

◾ Studios already working with Voodoo — Register here https://t.co/CXaNt8jz37

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

We’re looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join our Engineering & Data team.

Apply now: https://t.co/WI01SOGWpI

#wearehiring #lifeatVoodoo #tech

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Making the strategic shift to an individual contributor role at Voodoo: Meet Kenjy, the Creative Strategist in our Growth Team.

Take a look at the insights that have driven the success story that is his 6 years at Voodoo so far.

https://t.co/aUr5pRYac7

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

“After being in a bigger consulting firm, Voodoo is the perfect opportunity to put your learnings into practice.”

This is why our Head of Publishing Thibault de Vésinne-Larüe decided to join Voodoo two years ago.

Keep reading here ⬇️

https://t.co/mCE2RgJoqj

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Growth team culture at Voodoo — Voodoo Creative Awards

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Explore the most recent updates on our game Ball Blast, implemented by Andrey Shengalov's studio.

Check out our latest article at https://t.co/eeN3JcmVb4

#mobilegames #Voodooblog

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Want to know what Andrey Shengalov’s team has in store for Ball Blast players?

Check out the video below to see the new features! ⬇️

#mobilegames #mobileapps #hybridcasualgames

[Voodoo @VoodooPlatform]

Today we unveil our Voodoo Growth Platform: a tool created by our Growth team to improve marketing optimization efficiency and increase app revenues.

Learn more with this article below ⬇️
https://t.co/83518kMDRg

#Voodooblog