Meta Invests $40M in Mobile Gaming Company

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, invested $40 million in Tokyo-based mobile gaming company Playco earlier this year, according to Axios. 

The investment allows Playco to expand its user base by reaching as many platforms as possible and adds to Meta’s New Product Experiences division, which was established to allow Facebook to experiment with new apps that align with plans for future projects.

• Playco is aiming to build a game that more than 1 billion people can play.
• It wants its games to be multiplatform and available on major social networks.

In September 2020, Playco completed a $100 million Series A funding round valuing the company at more than $1 billion. The round was led by Sequoia Capital and venture capitalist Josh Buckley. 

Playco used the fresh capital to launch its first gaming titles “Ask Away” and “Heads Up!,” which were built from the ground up for video teleconferencing app Zoom.

It also used the cash to make an acquisition of its own by purchasing Goodboy Digital, a maker of an HTML5 game engine, for an undisclosed amount in September 2021. 

Win Some, Lose Some

Meta generated $33.7 billion in revenue in Q4 2021, a 20% increase compared to the same period the year prior. The company’s Reality Labs segment, which includes its VR and AR products, posted $877 million in revenue in Q4 — its best quarterly revenue in FY2021.

Despite the results, the segment reported an operating loss of $3.3 billion during the quarter.