Star Trek Timelines game maker Disruptor Beam raises $8.5M

Star Trek Timelines game maker Disruptor Beam raises $8.5M

Posted by John P. Bradford // February 3, 2017

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Disruptor Beamhas raised another $8.5 million to turn some of the best-known entertainment franchises into mobile games.

It released its first title, Game of Thrones Ascent, in 2013, with Star Trek Timelines following last year. (The latter offers a particularly novel approach toStar Trek, combining space combat with roleplaying elements as characters from different Trek TV shows and movies are thrown together thanks to a convenient temporal anomaly.)

The Boston-based startup says revenue grew by more than 300 percent last year, with most of that growth coming from Timelines. It also says that more than 15 million people have played its games.

Disruptor Beam founder and CEO Jon Radoff predicted that this will be another big year for Timelines, withthe launch of a new TV show, Star Trek Discovery, bringingfans back to the franchise.

As for whetherTimelines will include new characters fromthat show, Radoff said, Iknow one way or another, Discoverywill have a huge impacton us. The extent to which we incorporateelements of the show, thats stillTBD.

Next up is The Walking Dead: March to War, a multiplayer strategy game based on the popular zombie franchise, which is scheduled for release sometime in 2017. Radoff said the company hasother games in development, also based on well-known franchises,though its too early to announce them.

The new funding is a Series B led byGrandBanks Capital and Romulus Capital. Radoff noted that GrandBanks participated in Disruptor Beams $3.2 million Series A, and the firm has in fact bought out another early investor, Midverse Studios.

Besides launching new games and continuing to develop existing titles, Radoff plansto use the funding to build out Disruptor Beamspublishing platform, which coversthings like marketing, customer acquisition and support.

Those are all issues that other mobile gamingcompanies have to tackle, but Radoff said, Our problem isdifferent because of the [intellectual property]. A lot ofgames, when youre talkingabout customer acquisition,youre buying Facebook ads and getting peopleto installand spend money. Of course, we do that too, but its about being really authentic to the IP. We see ourselves down at a grassroots level, creating a deeper level of engagement.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/disruptor-beam-series-b/